#072: How Nico Ferreyra Left College, Crashed a Hacker House, and Built Default

I showed up to San Francisco like very, very broke from a state school and I showed up and I didn't really know anybody in person, right? Like I just tweeted my way into a hacker house and I figured out the rest there, right? Like, that is awesome because I don't think I could have done that in New York because the barrier to entry in San Francisco, like, is you will always have a couch you can sleep on if you're like an ambitious hacker or like you're— you just want to build a company, right? But I think at the same time, like that creates this like easy on-ramp for people who take advantage of the ecosystem. But then like in New York, I think the, the barrier to entry is much higher and you actually have to figure— you have to figure it out to stay here.

Welcome back to Season 3, Episode 15 of the Turning Pro Podcast. Today we have Nico Ferreira, who's the co-founder and CEO at Default. Thanks for joining us today, Nico.

Thanks for having me, guys.

No agenda, just straight riff.

Can we, can we talk about your upbringing? Let's not talk about tech for a second. Like, where were you born? Grow up. Take us through that.

Okay, cool.

So I love when immigrants come on the pod.

Yeah, dude, it's, it's, it's a good story. So I was born in Argentina. I was about a year old when we moved to the States. My dad had like gotten this offer from University of Florida to come do his like doctorate in agricultural engineering or something like that. So we moved to Gainesville. Lived there for probably 5 years, something like that. So we left in 2004, so about 5 years. And it was interesting. I kind of grew up in this— for the first 5 years here, in this student housing complex with a bunch of grad students. It was pretty sick. They did barbecues every Saturday night, went fishing. The Gulf of Mexico and stuff like that. And like my dad would like bring me along to the lab sometimes with his lab mates. It was pretty cool. It was a very like, kind of a very academic first 5 years in the States. And then when he graduated, he got— he'd been like doing this research with this like very small software company in Kentucky and not like Lexington, not like Louisville, like bumfuck middle of nowhere Kentucky. So we moved up to Kentucky and I was— I grew up there basically. So I spent like 18 years in Kentucky, ended up going to school for mechanical engineering and physics at UofL in Louisville, Kentucky, and dropped out my last semester, moved to San Francisco, and the rest is kind of history.

I knew you had a Southern twang.

I got a little bit of Southern twang.

Yeah, dude, he waited till his last semester.

Yeah, it was about— I think it was about 6 weeks out. Where it was like unofficially dropped out because I never like went into the student portal to— I think it was like applying for leave of absence or something like that. But basically I withdrew from like 2 of my classes and I just stopped replying to the emails like 2 months later. So I might—

I don't know.

I just never really went back.

My co-founder did the same thing because he went the SF route versus New York when he like got into this whole startup thing. I actually don't think you'd be where you were if you graduated.

Yeah, I agree. I like the way I viewed it was like I'm at this like state school in Kentucky. So like the floor already for like dropping out is like it's not that like I'm not going to fall that far, you know what I mean? Like worst case, it's just like go live with my parents and like hack on stuff, you know, and like figure it out from there. But like even then, like the— I just didn't think there was very much downside and I only saw upside. Especially because like that was like late 2021, 2020. I basically spent like my last year checked out and just like hacking on stuff with my now co-founder and like hanging out on Clubhouse and Twitter and Discord and just meeting people in tech and meeting people like our age in tech.

Yeah.

And just, you know, swarming Discord and Twitter and just riding the internet wave. So it was pretty cool.

I want to talk about that, like SF to New York.

Yeah.

Because when I graduated school, this was 2018, I did 2018, 2019, still like kind of end of ZIRP era in San Francisco. And I was doing venture and that's like where I quote, cut my teeth.

Yes.

I didn't know what the fuck I was doing, but I'm glad I did San Francisco for a couple of years.

Yeah.

Because I mean, New York still has the like hustle and grind 24/7 energy, which I love, but I can't exactly distill it or put words to it. But there is something different about the, I don't know, like the maniacal focus there that you do take here.

Yeah.

I don't know. Walk me through your experience.

Yeah. I think my, my dissolution so far is that San Francisco, like, really indexes on like, like you are rewarded in San Francisco, both financially, socially, and I mean, really financially and socially. Based on like how close you are to the epicenter of something that grows very quickly. So you can like an OpenAI engineer, for example, who's there in like the first like 100 people has been rewarded both like very, has been very rewarded like socially and like financially. The stock options are, I mean, their last round's like at 100 bill or something like that. So whereas like here, I think, it is a, it's a little more like, it's a lot more like institutionalized, I think. Like you're rewarded both like socially and financially based on like how close you are to that. Like when you first get to New York or like if you're from New York, like if you come from like the sort of like cream of the crop, like, you know, S-tier like school or like S-tier investment bank or something like that. And not just in tech, right? Like, there's finance, there's art, there's like music, there's like all these different like pods. Whereas in like San Francisco, I think it's a, it's a bunch of different like circles of hacker houses, hacker houses. And like even at a higher level, it's really just like GPs and the capital networks that have flushed out of like the last gen of last generation of like tech companies. So the most notorious one is obviously like PayPal Mafia, right? There's like Reid Hoffman at Greylock, Keith Rabois, who was at Founders Fund, is now at Khosla. Vinod Khosla, who is on the board of Square, actually, who's sort of a derivative of PayPal. And yeah, I mean, just tons and tons and tons of people that sort of came out of that. And then all these other umbrellas that have sort of popped up, right? You've got the Sequoia one. You've got Andreessen. You've got Benchmark. You know, you've got KP, all these different sort of like networks. And yeah, it's really interesting.

It did seem like there was a— even from the time I was there, when I moved there, I lived in a crypto hacker house.

You lived in Crypto Castle?

I lived in Crypto Castle with Samir.

He's like, oh, I know that one.

Samir from— fuck, what's his company?

Vise.

Yeah.

You live with Tom Schulz as well? No.

Him and Oren. So like the fund I was at, Orest was a co-GP there.

Oh, cool.

And, uh, sorry, Jeremy Gardner was a co-GP there from Awesome. And Samir was like the first person I met. He was like 16 at the time or something. But it did seem like there was a— it wasn't just like even the people that are grinding in New York, it does— it still does stop at like 8 or 9 PM, maybe not— maybe not everyone. But it seems out there, there was like a— like all-encompassing every single day, maybe not working as hard, but just like it was everything to them. Which I think you learned something from that.

I definitely think the intensity of work is higher in New York.

I would agree.

But the intensity of like focus and obsession is higher in San Francisco. So I think like if you start off in a place where like you develop that maniacal focus and like obsession with your craft and then you move to a place where like you actually just work harder, I think you're in a much better spot. Yeah, because I mean, my co-founder and I, like, we still stay at the office until like 2 a.m., right? It's that part. Has only gotten, it's like gotten more intense since we moved to New York, whereas in San Francisco, I think less founders we saw at the time working weekends and staying really late at the office. I think especially in our vintage, I guess, there was a lot more like Zerpy behaviors. We saw a lot more founders taking trips, being like very extravagant and stuff like that. But, um, now I think there's a lot more like hard work in San Francisco, at least from like what I've seen from like my close founder friends.

Yeah, I think you described— when we were in the Hamptons a few weeks ago at that retreat, you described it to me, uh, which I thought was interesting, where in SF it's a lot more like billionaire bust. Yeah, like you're chasing the next OpenAI outcome, right? Whereas here I think there's a lot more people that are like building more sound businesses.

I agree with that. And this is another point I want to make that in San Francisco, I think like there's this sort of like all-encompassing, like, you know, grandeur, like you have to go for like billion or bust or like $10 billion or bust. And like that has to be like what you're going for to raise money, to like hire, et cetera. And to just be able to have founder friends, I think like nobody really wants to work with people that are just doing like small things in San Francisco, I think. But also at the same time, like, that is a fatal flaw, I think, of San Francisco because there's so many people who hide behind that as like a way to take advantage of the ecosystem. Like, the beauty of San Francisco is also like one of its fatal flaws. Like, I was— I showed up to San Francisco like very, very broke from a state school and I showed up and I didn't really know anybody in person, right? I just tweeted my way into a hacker house and I figured out the rest there, right? That is awesome because I don't think I could have done that in New York because the barrier to entry in San Francisco is you will always have a couch you can sleep on if you're an ambitious hacker or you just want to build a company, right? But I think at the same time, that creates— creates this easy on-ramp for people who take advantage of the ecosystem and people who pivot from creator economy back in 2020 to Web3 in 2021.

DAO tooling.

To DAO tooling.

Oh, forgot that one.

To now AGI. I've seen this progression happen so many times. But then in New York, I think the barrier to entry is much higher and you actually have to figure it out to stay here, right? In San Francisco, if you like don't mess up that bad, one of your friends is always gonna hire you and is gonna give you some like bullshit VP role. So you can like, you can coast for like 18 months, like rest and vest at your friend's company and then they're gonna be your first angel check and then they're gonna introduce you to the lead investor who led their like Series B or whatever. And then you're gonna go start your next time. It's just like a recycled recipe. That's like the formula for San Francisco. So there's like always that backdrop. But in New York, I think that's like, that is not the case. And I think as a result, like the companies here who like figure it out and are able to build like a very sound like economic engine and they're a lot more commercial like earlier on, like they stay here longer because the city's so expensive to live in, right? Like you can't just not figure it out and be paying $4K a month in rent for 4 years. You know, it just doesn't work like that. So I don't know, I think the result of that is like you see more of the seed stage companies in New York are a lot more commercial leaning. And as a result, you see more high-quality seed stage companies who have like $1 million or $2 million in revenue before they've raised, you know, more than $2 or $3 million in seed funding. Yeah.

What about socially?

Socially in New York?

The difference?

New York is like, it's very, very, very different. It's just a completely different world here. Like, I have a lot more friends in like finance. I have lots of friends who like work in art and like film and stuff like that, which like I didn't have in San Francisco. And San Francisco is like way more of like a social echo chamber. But at the same time, like, those aren't the people I hang out with every day. I hang out with like founders. I hang out with like people who work at startups. And the ecosystem here is, it's just, it's definitely a lot more like fragmented. Like there are sort of like camps that pop up. I feel like this one, like, you know, the, you know, Platter Haven adjacent camp is like one. And there's like a bunch that are like Ramp alumni. And then there are a bunch that are like, What's that company? There's like this health tech company from a while back.

Ro.

Ro. Yeah, there's Ro. It's the guy who started Operator Partners. I feel like there are a bunch of—

Weinberg.

Yeah. His last company, Flatiron Health. There's like a bunch of other companies that spun out of that. I feel like there are all these camps of founders. It's just kind of all over the place and like not centralized at all because the city is like way bigger. There's nothing that like brings everybody together.

What drove you to come here when you were building Default?

Yeah, so, um, first things first, I think, um, we'd hired a bunch of people in Europe and, uh, we're starting to hire more in New York. And my co-founder just basically got tired of waking up that early to, to like go to stand-up and stuff like that. So we're like, all right, we should probably make this a little easier on ourselves. Plus like the switching cost of like our location was much lower. We were 24 and 23 at the time, probably, or like 25 and 24. Um, and we just wrapped up like a year and a half here. I think I'm at the, like, the year and almost the year and a half mark. Um, and then also, like, I was just starting to feel that San Francisco was, um, it was not doing it for me anymore, you know? And like, I think, I think there was way too much of specifically like founders of like my age and like our age, like who were indexing on the wrong things. And that was the group that I was in, you know, I and it was I saw it as like much easier to like, you know, move to New York where I already had like some of my best, like the friends of mine who were like some of the best founders I know were here. It was a much easier decision for me to say, all right, let's just like hike it to New York. Like worst case, I stay there for like 2 or 3 years and I hike it back to San Francisco. San Francisco, uh, but I show up, I build a great team in the city that works hard and works a lot and figure stuff out.

How has that affected maybe some of the like external pressures that you were feeling maybe in SF, or like the how the self-talk has changed by being in a different environment?

It's definitely helped a lot. Um, I think when I moved here, probably 3 months after I moved here, I stopped focusing a lot on what the outside or external perception of Default was. And what that was sort of a forcing function for us, like doing a lot of like smaller things better. Because like this, the company we're building is like, it's not one where we can cut corners and like still be successful. There's a lot of stuff that has to be true for us to win. And I think in San Francisco, like the, the, especially at the time, like we were in a sort of not very good funding market, a lot of pressure from investors to sort of like commercialize very early, even though like our product just wasn't ready yet. Like we spent like almost 2 years basically building the product before we onboarded or before we like launched publicly. And I'm I think we're much better off having done that in New York than in San Francisco.

I want to talk about state of B2B go-to-market, and let's start with Default. And so you guys go live, what were the distinct phases where you kind of noticed a change of inbound activity picking up? What were kind of those phases for you thus far?

I guess for us specifically, or for just companies in general? Yeah, so we didn't want to go live until we could dogfood our own product for ourselves for like the first 18 months of us being in market. That was a very high bar. And I do think, if anything, like we launched maybe too early because initially we set off to, you know, consolidate this like very fragmented cost center for RevOps and marketing teams specifically, which was like inbound to tooling, so you think the form on the website, which you usually— for a more mature company, you'll buy a marketing automation platform like HubSpot or Marketo. And you're starting to see a little bit of the CMS world starting to eat away at the form element. And then there's this other layer underneath, which is the API calls that happen from the form to either the marketing automation platform or the CRM, or with something like Zapier, you're basically piping the data that you're ingesting downstream. And then there's this sort of like client side or like prospect facing side, which is like the scheduling element, right? And what we knew is like the complexity of this workflow scales very nonlinearly, like as your company grows, 'cause you start adding more sales reps, you start baking in like territories, your CRM data starts to get kind of shitty. You start rolling out segments, you start rolling out new products, and then the way of— the workflow, which at a high level seems pretty simple, just getting the right lead to the right person on the sales team, that just gets way harder as your company grows. And it becomes incredibly expensive because you just buy all this tooling that is the best at doing one part of that workflow, and you end up paying like $600K a year for that workflow, which like this company we talked to back in December, like told us that we're paying $590,000 across these 4 products, which is just scheduling, routing, marketing automation, and then like lead enrichment. And we were like, oh shit, okay, well, you know, we can do all of this right out of the gate. So, you know, it's something that we sort of like gradually built into, but in terms of like how the volume has picked up, like, Initially we were having like, we would get like a few inbounds a month, like maybe like 10 to 20 or something like that. When we launched, we, we got hundreds and I was, I was able to close like probably like the first like 30 or 40 customers myself, like off of the first probably like 2 to 3 months, like following the launch, something like that, which in hindsight was probably like too much for me. I should have hired an AE sooner and like, yeah, brought somebody in who could help me not only write the playbook, but make it a lot better, because there was a lot of stuff I was doing incorrectly just by being a first-time seller, right? But now, I mean, we get a steady drumbeat of probably 5 to 10 inbound demos booked a day.

A day?

A day, yeah.

What things are fueling that? What inputs are you guys doing? Obviously, there's just compounding brand in the market. Now you have customer referrals kicking in.

Yeah, I think that— The best startup marketing pre-Series B is some derivative of like the hero's journey. Like we call this like founder-led marketing, right? But like I think what we don't realize is like startups are a spectator sport, man. Like when Quibi went down, like there were so many people just like dunking on that company, right? And you see like the other side of it, like Clay. Clay has just like ravenous like fanfare for the products. They've built something that's It's so great, and it solves a very, very painful problem for people that— people just rave about the product. And I think the best startup marketing is telling the story of the hero, i.e., the founders and the team, and finding different story arcs and finding different ways of telling that same story over and over again. So for us, We do a lot of social, like LinkedIn is huge for us. We've been investing a lot more in like SEO and like content, like we've been doing more case studies, more blog posts. A lot of it, like at this point it's like we're trying to rank for like the right keywords and stuff like that. But LinkedIn has been like one of the biggest things. Twitter a little bit more now. I've been a little bit more active there and it's bringing in probably like the lower end of our ICP, probably like the, we call like the, like ICP1, which is like seed Series A stage companies, like don't really have a system in place, but like they're very attracted to like the, the story or like the narrative that we publish there. And the same thing is true on LinkedIn. And then one of our bigger ones as well has been the LinkedIn conversational ads as well. That's been really big. We have to run more of like a sort of like a pseudo ABM kind of play at our stage. But we use a lot of like first-party intent and stuff like that. So it's a bit more sophisticated than I think like most seed stage companies.

So the art of storytelling also parlays into your fundraising capabilities. Yeah, definitely. And I would say you've done pretty well in that category.

Yeah, yeah. So far so good on the fundraising. We've never used a deck, which has been great. Never used a deck. We had a memo that we wrote a long time ago.

That's where Cyrus gets this from.

Yeah, yeah. The no deck thing.

He's like, I refuse to make one. If someone asks for it, I'm passing on them.

Yeah. I just think that, um, there are certain companies where like you can tell a very visual story and people are gonna, it's gonna make people feel good and they're gonna wanna invest. Right. And I think for us it's more of like, um, it's a little more complicated. Like there are various parts of the story you have to buy to think we are going to be like a $100 billion company. That is so hard to put into a deck. I'm also like, I don't know how to do that. I don't know how to put this stuff into a deck. And like, I really like long-form writing. I think like one of the best pieces of long-form writing for like fundraising is like the Rippling Series A memo is incredible. They used it in like 2019 to raise their Series A from Kleiner Perkins. And I still think it's like one of the best pieces of long-form writing for, startups that I've seen in recent memory. It's really good.

I actually just made— I made a memo, so I made a deck. Yeah, but I actually made a memo last week.

Yeah.

So, you know what, I'm going to— I'm going to— I'm going to— I'm going to start with this and see how this goes for me.

Yeah. It's just— it also, like, it helps you uncover the gaps in your thinking that— because, like, we all have blind spots, right? And I think, like, there's a certain, it's like the, you have like a blindness as a founder to like the things, the hairy problems that you're eventually gonna have to solve or like the logical gaps in your thinking that you sort of move away from when you're telling your story because they don't make you feel good as a founder. And I think like just writing it all out and then realizing which parts like don't make sense is a much better way of building this like bulletproof narrative and building your company around that bulletproof narrative. Because at that point it's just like, okay, here's everything we know, you know, every possible like path we can take. And here's like, you basically end up writing out this like manifesto of exactly what you're going to do. And like early on, it's like pre-figuring out your unit economics and like getting to product market fit. The only thing you need to figure out is like proving yourself wrong, right? Like why am I not wrong? On go-to-market, on product, et cetera. It's all like just figuring out all the parts that can be better and should be better and some of the parts that shouldn't even exist.

In the process of your fundraising, what would you say you did really well? And if you could go back and do it again, what would you say are maybe a couple of mistakes you made?

I think one of the parts I did really well was probably building up really good social proof. So when we first raised money, We were, it was very late 2021 and I had just moved to San Francisco. So like I, you know, didn't really, I had like no real idea of like what I was doing, but I like saw a lot of patterns in the fundraising stories I'd heard and a lot of what like much smarter, like much more experienced founders had told me. Run like social proof and like, you know, building momentum going into a fundraise. Like one of the things we did is like, I went and cold outbounded a ton of go-to-market operators. Folks who worked at Figma, folks who worked at, you know, Airtable, Notion, Ramp, et cetera. I was like, hey, I'm raising money for this company. I know that you all have this problem because I am looking at your website and I see that you're not making it easy for your your demo hand raisers to book a demo with your sales team and you have, you know, 100 people on your sales team, so there's an obvious disconnect here. We're very early, but I'm fairly confident that we're gonna raise a seed round in the next 2 to 3 months and I would love for you to be a part of our story. That was like the outbound message, you know, at a high level. But I sent it to maybe like 100, 200 people and maybe 10 replied and of those 10, like, probably 5 or 6 invested. And those people were like the right people to have in our corner. Folks like the VP of Sales at Figma, Kyle Parish, like the then head of growth at Airtable, Lauren Isford. And they just really championed us a lot, gave us a ton of proof in terms of like how we were thinking through things, obviously made it, made the company much more like reputable as, you know, people, especially good market operators, I think are like very, very high bar. So they're getting like oversold to like all the time. People are always like selling them stuff, right? Especially with this like AI stuff that's, that's coming out. Like there's a ton of DMs and cold outbound they're getting all the time, but it made the company much more fundable.

I want to talk about the value of like those early champions and also like early marquee logos. Yeah, because especially in agency land, like some agencies exist to this day because they signed RAMP at seed and they just— it was random. They just happened to get introduced. They worked with them for 4 years and they're the agency that did, I don't know, SEO for RAMP or design for RAMP or whatever it is. Red Antler, like their branding.

Yeah, right.

And so I'm curious from your lens, what were a handful of either early angels or early just like friends of yours that kind of plugged you in or one or two marquee logos And any stories behind those or how they came about?

Yeah, the early marquee logos, I think we got— we had a lot of like false positives early on. You know, we're like, this is kind of the— this is one of those like negative parts for our company of operating in San Francisco at the time where we felt a huge like pressure to onboard customers and use that as our feedback loop rather than just like leading with what we knew about like the product we needed to build. We almost like put our vision aside for a little bit, uh, very, very early on. And we were like, all right, let's just like onboard people onto this thing that's obviously not complete. And it's obviously not the full build and see what they say. And we did that a lot of times. We were like, all right guys, like this is cool. And whatnot, but it doesn't do like what we need yet, right? It like, it does part of it, which is great. Like people would replace like their HubSpot form with a default form. Um, but it didn't do like the full thing we were promising, which is like, we're going to make orchestrating your inbound as simple as possible. Um, and we're going to, you know, all the downstream effects of that, right? We're going to consolidate your tech stack. We're going to give you like the superior first-party integration that you can't get anywhere else because we built it all in one place. You know, just all these promises that we wanted to make that we couldn't really deliver on. So our early marquee logos, I think, came from outbound and warm referrals to qualified companies. And I just put out this tweet, like, a couple days ago around, like, warm intros, like, warm intros killing startups, because I think that for us, we had a lot of warm intros to companies that looked so good on paper. They were just like, oh my God, the logos are amazing. They're growing super fast, yada yada. Obviously, we want to close these guys. And we'd get warm intros, we'd get them using the product, and they just weren't a good fit. And they also gave us false— in some cases, it was too positive. They gave us a false sense of product-market fit before the product had a unique DNA or was opinionated enough in the right ways. So we ended up like churning a bunch of like warm intros, like killing social capital that we had like asked our investors, like our homies for. And yeah, it just kind of sucked.

So I think you get like excited.

Yeah.

Because you know, you have access to these people.

Yeah, exactly.

And no one's patient because everyone wants to get everything done yesterday and you're just like eager to get out there.

Yeah.

Versus just like it takes humility to like wait to play your cards right at the right time.

Yeah, 100%.

Which is something that I've like tried to grapple with over the last couple of years as well with building Platter.

Yeah, I think from a customer acquisition lens, the thing that warm intros are always great. Like if Platter gets a warm intro from a customer, on one hand you're like, that is a great signal that our customers love it well enough to introduce. On the other hand, it is not a repeatable go-to-market motion or acquisition vehicle by any means. And so anytime we're I always look at customers we recently closed of the past 3 or 4 warm intros. I'm like, all right, well, our content's broken, our social is broken, we index heavily on meeting the right investors, that channel's broken. Why are none of these converting? So on one hand, it's great, and on the other hand, it's pretty scary from a repeatable lens.

Yeah, I think also the way we frame this internally historically is the cost of of recurring revenue generating scalable go-to-market motion varies by business because sometimes like you eat this like insane product cost initially. Like for us, we spent millions and millions of dollars building the product so far. And it's like on the bet that we have built all of the right foundations to be able to cross-sell. Like, our thing is like, when can we start cross-selling? It's not like, when do we get to a million in ARR? Because we don't really care like how long it takes us to go from zero to a million in ARR. What we care about is like, how long is it going to take us to go from like one to ten, right? So, if we can get to like, I don't know, two or three million in ARR, right? This is, this was our thinking probably a year and a half ago. If we can get to like two to three million in ARR, like selling like a mix, a mixed bag of like solutions for like more or less the same ICP, and we can prove that we can get other solutions in the door and that those solutions are at least at parity with like the market incumbents and like we get much better net revenue retention from selling you like, you know, a form and then selling you like inbound scheduling when you need to start routing demos. Like that is a much better, much sexier business, we think, than something that's just a form builder that scales from 1 to 10 million in like a year.

I just think there's more sustainability there.

There's—

because you have, you have the proof points that like if you're able to successfully cross-sell, yeah, that means that one of your products at scale can be a loss leader to just like get brands into the ecosystem to sell other things, which I'm dealing with that in real time right now. Like we're, we're launching a new product that's in beta right now and we pitched it to our 5 largest customers and every single one said yes.

Yeah.

Which is like a really good signal.

It's a very good signal.

That like because our, our hero product is the least scalable product that we have, but the stickiest product that we have.

Yep.

We're betting on the relationship that we have with our customers because of how sticky it is to be able to land and expand.

That's exactly what we're doing. We are very— Default is a very hard and painful product to rip out once you've implemented it. Our happiest customers have implemented it very, very well. Our unhappiest customers have not implemented it well. So our north star is like, right now is like making sure every single customer, every new customer we onboard gets to like the right implementation for their team, their tech stack, and their go-to-market motion as quickly as possible. And just proving everything out for like the core, our core bread and butter right now. And then in 2 quarters, we're gonna have a bunch of stuff that we're gonna be cross-selling. So.

On the note of unhappy customers. Yeah. I feel like anytime I'm having like good days, bad days, not even days, it's hour to hour.

It's just hour to hour. Yeah.

It's good hours.

I'm always like one Slack message away from like having my day ruined.

Oh, consistently.

Yeah.

And hope that it's later in the day.

That's a good tweet.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I'm going to throw that one in the drafts after.

Every founder is one Slack message away from a good day being ruined.

Yeah.

Yeah.

One Slack Connect message away from it.

And I feel— So I'll just put this out there. On throughout that, like, up and downs of those Slack messages, where is your head at? Like, have you learned to deal with those shitty messages of, like, customer returning?

Yeah, it sucks, man. Like, it sucks.

Like, we just suck every time and you just get used to it.

No, I mean, like, some— we try and be, like, very optimistic. Long-term optimistic, short-term pragmatic. If we are getting signals that it's really hard for people to connect their form on their website, it sucks to see that the thing that we've built isn't up to snuff, right? But it's also a very good signal that if we make this better, this will go away. And customers won't make us feel sad, right? Long term, I think customers really buy into our vision for sort of being like the Costco of go-to-market SaaS. And that is a very good thing to see. That's what keeps everybody going, right? Because there's a lot of like, to be able to do, the thing about our strategy is we had to build 7 solutions basically for a seed stage company. Which is hard because each one of them has to be pretty good. They can't really suck. And sometimes they do suck because we hit some edge case where a customer wants to do something that they otherwise wouldn't do with default, but it's because we've opened up the floodgates by having all this integration under the hood. It's something we just didn't think of before, that we just didn't make the experience of setting that up the best. So we have to find workarounds and stuff like that. Sucks for the customer sometimes, you know?

Yeah, but like in the context of edge cases, there's just— you cannot— you can't predict a lot of those.

No, no, we can't.

I think every business deals with that, right? Like we dealt with that so much with building like the base infrastructure of an e-commerce storefront. Like a brand that has 1,000 SKUs, yeah, and different price point is going to have different requirements than a brand with like 2 SKUs. And inevitably you're trying to build something that appeals to a lot, knowing that there's going to be edge cases. But I think that's any journey of like an early stage company.

Yeah, definitely.

You just don't want to disappoint someone, so you get frustrated when someone tells you it doesn't do what they wanted.

Exactly. Yeah, the leading indicator for us of handling edge cases is basically— there's two. Number one is how many integrations do we support? If someone says, hey guys, I want to move all my lead data into Google Sheets, we should probably support that. And us not supporting that is negative. That's a job to be done that the customer has that we can't support. And the second thing is like data reference and like the flexibility of our workflow engine, right? Like how flexible is it really? And getting there is hard, right? Because you're also building against like the requests you haven't seen yet, but that you probably will see in the future.

If default fails, what's the reason?

Default fails, what's the reason? There's probably a couple different cases where default fails. Like number one, We are, um, we just fail to make, to build new solutions fast enough and we're wrong about net revenue retention. Um, the other case where we fail, I think is not very probable, but it's one where customers end up hacking together a ton of like horizontal or like use case specific, like AI agent. Solutions and they just have all the stuff like working in Tana, but I think that is very, very improbable. Running out of money, I don't think we're going to be there, at least not for the next 4 years.

That won't be your issue.

It won't be the case. I think it's really going to be like failing to build the right solutions and take them to market the way customers need them.

Was there a point in the journey so far, this kind of touches on like turning pro moment, where you realize that you're like, all right, I'm like a half decent operator versus like early days where you genuinely had no idea what was going on?

I think it's a— it's like the— it's ups and downs, right? Like there's some days where I'm just like, dude, we have to figure this out. Oh my God. Like, we have like not touched this yet and we need to figure out this part of the business equation. And then There are other days where I feel really good and I'm like, oh yeah, this makes total sense. Like, you know, good job.

We're selling 3 years, going great.

And then you get the Slack message.

And then I get the Slack message and I cry in a corner. Yeah, that's how it goes. So yeah, I mean, I think it like waxes and wanes, right? There's definitely been like a very low point like 2 years ago where I was like, oh my God, like, what did we sign up for? Sort of like looking ahead at like the roadmap and it was a symptom of us like not hiring the right people fast enough, which we figured out. We hired more good engineers and, you know, got, got back to it.

What does your day-to-day actually look like? Because I feel like if someone's just seen you on social, yeah, they see you shitposting.

Yeah.

See you at the Haven retreat in the Hamptons. They see you on this podcast.

Yeah.

What does it actually look like? What time you wake up?

No, that's it. That's what he does.

That's all I do, actually.

Wake up, Twitter. Pop out to the Hamptons.

Podcast maxing and bumping up the—

Dude, it's all go-to-market.

It's all, dude, it's all go-to-market. I'm in founder mode, dude. No, I think right now I'm moving— I'm in this awkward transition phase away from founder-led sales to more founder-managed sales. So it's uncovering a lot of half-baked— processes and a lot of half-baked processes under the hood of just like how we sell and how we market. And then also a lot of areas where like I've not done a very good job of moving information like from my brain into like our go-to-market team's brain and like our support team's brain as well. So I'm working on that, but then also I'm like, I'm unironically like in founder mode, like on product stuff. Like one of the biggest mistakes I have made, I think, is stepping back from, stepping back from product, not as in, and not as in like not doing any product, but like not being very prescriptive about like what we needed to do and like, you know, still caring about like the details. Which not to say like our team can't do that because I fully trust our team and whatnot. I think it's just like I have the most information asymmetry out of everyone across the team. Like I understand like our customers' pain points really well because like I do the support, our workflow specialist does support, and then my co-founder does support. And that's like, that's the support team. It's like us three and like occasionally, you know, someone else from the team for a more technical customer support inquiry, but I know what customers are running into and I know how we design things in the past, like before our designers showed up, and I know how and why we chose to build things historically and why past solutions didn't work. So it's much easier for me to just be in the details and have a constant feedback loop with our design team, with our engineering team, et cetera, than letting them figure it out together. 'Cause eventually, like, we will hit that point where, like, everyone knows each other, everyone has built up this, like, historical backlog and, like, you know, a good enough, like, index of, like, all the product decisions, like, the minutiae and stuff like that. But for now, I'm still, like, still in founder mode, so.

I feel like I'm just starting to see the results of, 'cause we launched, like, 2 and a half years ago. And our exec team, we hired about, like, a year, year and a half ago. And our VP of Ops, I think, She was the first exec hire. She's been here like a year and a half. And only now I'm just starting to see, she's always been very good, but like the institutional knowledge buildup, I feel like I'm only really starting to see her real potential where it's like, holy shit, you know way more than I do because you've been across every single part of this business. It's like a cool moment when that starts to happen.

Yeah, we see that too with our team. Like some of our earliest engineers are, you know, they're still on the team and they have all this context on why we built stuff way back when because they owned that project. Now they've moved on, they've kind of specialized. But a good example is we just hired this A-player from Klaviyo. He's a machine. He's really, really good, incredible engineer, incredible teammate. He's been working on one of our new products that we're getting ready to launch. And the engineer who built that now is one of our scheduling platform leads, right? So he runs scheduling now. And we saw really great knowledge transfer between those two early on a couple of months ago when we first kicked off the project. And I think what I'm trying to do now is make that easier on the go-to-market side.

I think knowledge transfer is probably one of the most important things for a founder when you scale your team.

Yeah, 100%.

Because no one will ever have the vision that you have. You can communicate it as best as you can, but it's not as clear in anyone else's head, so you can't make the assumption that it is. And when you do, that's when things start to get derailed.

That's been another learning for me is like accepting that no one sees what I see. And some of the moments where I was like the most frustrated, it's because I just didn't understand that. I didn't have the maturity to understand that. And I was putting like unreal expectations on the team to like know exactly what I was thinking because I was like talking about it all the time. But like people just see, they see things and they see ideas and they see your thoughts like very differently than you do. Because of all the context they do or don't have, right? They have like, everybody has like historical biases and like, you know, different frames of reference for like different things we tell them. And no one can sort of see exactly what you mean. So you've got to go out of your way to.

As you've honed in on your ICP, I feel like early stages there may be an ICP that you want to focus on, maybe because you like hanging out with that archetype of person or you like building for them. Like that's something early days of Verbatim, we'd work with just like the CEOs directly. Yeah, it was fun because it was my friend. And we just chop it up on like go-to-market strategy. And now, even though we still love our seed stage startups and we can do a good job for them, the way better customer for us is a head of marketing at like a Series B company. Because if we do a good job, they're going to stick with us for like 2+ years. And so it's an awkward transition that we're going through. It's almost like two separate products. So I'm curious, have you guys gone through a similar thing? Because I'm sure you loved selling to your homies.

Oh yeah, dude, I love selling to founders. The founder sale is like my favorite sale. It is, it's a close call, but it's like my favorite sale. 'Cause I go in, I can speak their language. I built this product like for myself initially, or we built this product like for Victor and I and like what we faced our last company. We had like stitched together like Typeform, Calendly, Zapier, Clearbit, HubSpot, Customer.io, just like all this stuff. And that's my favorite type of sale. But now like my, new favorite type of sale, or like what's, will probably become my new favorite type of sale is like the RevOps team.

Enterprise RevOps.

Love selling to RevOps as well because they're like hackers at their core. I think less product-facing, like technical skill, obviously, but they're just so sophisticated in terms of like understanding the technical problems and they're like the aha moments. We will have like 4 or 5 aha moments like over the course of an initial demo call where people are like, oh my gosh, like you're telling me that this weird like Salesforce automation we built like 5 years ago from some outsourced like RevOps agency, no one knows how to audit, no one knows what it does. I can just turn off and I can just make it a branch in this default workflow. And I, that is like just my favorite thing to hear that like we've made a bunch of like the right small product calls that enable people to do what we promised them 3 years ago when we were failing to sell and retain customers of that size.

And then Nico will have this aha moment in 5 years when a buyer is like, oh, I get it. Here's $100 million. Dude, this has been awesome. I know we have a hard stop here. We're coming up on time. So you want to just look at the camera on the left, let everyone know where they could find you, what you're working on?

Yeah. My name is Nico Ferreira, co-founder and CEO of Default. You can find me on Twitter and LinkedIn.

And what's that URL?

Default.com, baby.

Default.com.

Default.com. Shout out. Good stuff, man.

There we go.

Oh yeah. That's a wrap. Good shit.