He wrote the book on Account Based Marketing. Here are his GTM secrets for enterprise. | Bassem Hamdy, Founder of Briq

But the other understanding is how to translate problems into actual solutions. That's a skill that I think every founder needs to know how to do. And I think some founders have the audacity to believe that they are the only solution. You know, I always say natural curiosity wins out the day we're raised. Not to talk about money. It's a sin. It's like embarrassing. You don't talk about money, talk about money. You got to go in and say, who has the money?

Who?

Can you write the check? I have no problem being that bold. I'm like, who's going to write this check? Whose name is on the check? If you're meeting people at a trade show, that's for your event and you didn't know who they were before the event, you're really bad at this. I never feel like I have two Product Market. What are you talking about? Only the paranoid survive. You don't want to change things too much. It's like staying in shape. You got to work out every day. Product Market Fit is a daily workout. You don't run those five miles, you're going to get big. That's Product Market Fit. Product Market Fit. Product Market Fit. I called it the Product Market Fit question. Product Market Fit.

Product Market Fit.

Product Market Fit. Product Market Fit. I mean, the name of the show is Product Market Fit.

Do you think the Product Market Fit show has Product Market Fit? Because if you do, then there's something you just have to do. You have to take out your phone, you have to leave the show five stars. It lets us reach more founders and it lets us get better guests. Thank you. Awesome. Welcome to the show, man.

Thank you.

Pablo, you started brick, what, maybe six, seven years ago or so. So we're going to jump into all that and really been focused mainly now you're a series B stage company, raised over $50 million. But really jump into that first part of it, the first inning, so to speak, when you really found Product Market Fit. Tell me a bit more about this first version of the product. It's not immediately clear to me exactly like what you're trying to solve, what.

You'Re trying to do in construction. There is so much cross party execution and risk to think about it. I don't know how familiar you are with that supply chain or a value chain. Think about it. You have an owner, let's say it's Amazon. They own the site. They want to build something, so they hire an architect and an engineer. So now we're up to three companies. They design things the Engineer hires a bunch of specialists, maybe a mechanical plumbing engineer. So now you're up to five companies. They go out and they put out a bid package. Let's say general contractor bids on it. The general contractor needs 16 subcontractors. So now we're up to 21 companies. And add on to that the material suppliers, which could be in the hundreds. Now nobody owns the single version of the truth. It's not like any other industry. I know people say construction's slow to pick up technology or dumb or, you know, these hard hats don't get tech. No, that's not true. We are in the most complex full contact Sport out there. 21 cross parties. Data in all 21 systems needs to be, some of it needs to be in sync. And when you think about that complexity of, oh, let's just create a portal for all 21 companies to log in. That's fugazi. Nobody, you know, nobody's logging into your Pablo's, you know, construction owner system. Nobody wants to do that. And that's not realistic.

They each kind of have their own tools for their own workflows sort of thing.

Exactly. Everybody has, everybody has their own hammer because that's what they do for a living. Right. So you need to understand that they're going to use their hammer. And if their hammer happens to be Autodesk construction cloud and your hammer happens to be procore, somebody else's is CMYC or computer E or whatever. Now you have so much different version of the truth where you look at what the original and where we end up. It's an evolution. But I would say that the original version was all data. There was no front end. The idea was how do we collect the pieces of information without giving humans any extra work? Collect the pieces of information to sew together a tapestry of what the real story is. What is the real story of this project? Why did it cost this? Why did it fail? Why was it successful? Why was it delivered late? All of that information exists in so many different places. And the idea was to create essentially a protocol in order for that to happen. Now I can tell you once we get into it a little bit more how difficult that is.

I was going to say, like, and especially in 2018, like, that sounds very, I mean, it sounds very valuable, but it sounds very hard.

It was crazy. We got in there and we said, this is what we're raising on and you know, I know how to pitch and we got a little bit of seed funding.

How much did you raise?

Well, we raised maybe two and a half on our seed round, maybe a little less. Not a big number. We had enough to like operate for a couple years though, because we were lean, very lean at the time. But the thing is, Pablo, the stark reality of entrepreneurship kicked me in the teeth. In the first six months, we're like, we're going to be that protocol data layer. And then you're like, okay, computer ease. You're a 30 year old accounting system. Where's your API? And then we're like, there are no APIs. And then you try to understand their database structure. You're like, I don't know what's happening? And so very, very quickly, we realized this was not the industry for a data protocol. And that was our first major pivot.

How long did it take from the time you raised your seed round to kind of that realization?

Faster than that. I know, what do they say? Fail, fail fast. Probably three months. You know, I had a good, a great network, so we had clients that were willing to lean in and help co develop and you know, when you got into it, really underneath the hood, forgetting about all the platitudes that, you know, we talked about as I came up in the industry, you know, talking about APIs and interoperability and, you know, everybody being friendly and cooperative, it just didn't exist. So you're now I was in a situation of like, what are we going to do? I guess I'll go back to work. Luckily, one of our engineers that I was lucky enough to find, who's employee number three at Brick, raised a hand. And at the time, in 2018, Pablo was called RPA, raised a hand and said, why bother going to the back end? Why bother asking for APIs? Why don't we just build bots that will operate and extract the data? That was our only dream was, okay, we're going to extract the data. What we found very quickly. And one of our first projects was confidentially, I can't say the names, but one of the largest contractors in the US and one of the largest social networks in the world, they were building a data center. And the idea was that the data center was going to have Brick as its data backbone. And so we're going into the social media company Systems and pulling data out, running reports, using our bots, doing the same thing on the contractor side, consolidating the report once a week. And then the contractor goes, do you think you could do data entry too? And we're like, you know, you're a startup, you're not going to say no. It's like, yeah, probably. And so the bot then went in and entered data into the social media site. And that was crazy. And they saw this happening. It looked like a player piano in the old West. People couldn't comprehend what it was doing. It was a very deterministic bot though. It was like had to have really, really it's early, early days as a very detailed instructions, you know, navigation instructions, data compliance instructions, data entry instructions. It was deterministic, but once it had the instructions that did the same thing every time, didn't fail. And that was really exciting. And that was my aha moment. It's like, wow, automation. And I didn't know anything about UiPath or automation anywhere at the time. Automation is going to be the way companies that work in industries like ours where many of the software packages they still use today and buy by the way, this isn't. They actually procure the were built before you were born. Probably Pablo. Like this is like crazy software that isn't going anywhere. It's a hammer that just works for them. And so the bot moment was that really like that one aha moment was like, hey, these bots are kind of cool. And that's kind of how we exploded from there.

When was that moment in the timeline?

I would say that was 2019.

Okay, so it wasn't that much longer after kind of the RPA realization three months in. But how did you get, for example, in the middle of these two massive players, how did you get this pilot?

You know, I'm lucky enough to be a go to market CEO. I think there's two, there's different types of CEOs. I just happen to go to market. I'm a big fish in a very small pond. I know everybody in the industry. You know, you work in this industry for 26 years, it's like, holy cow. Like you have connections, you can drop a quarter, I like to say, and get something going. The other thing is I know the problem. And you know, even though I was chief marketing officer through my career, my original career said, you know, I ran product for a long time. And running product you learn this muscle memory of like, what problem are you trying to solve? Is one part of it. I know people love talking about that as a product manager. But the other understanding is how to translate problems into actual solutions. That's a skill that I think every founder needs to know how to do. And I think some founders have the audacity to believe that they are the only solution, which is great. And I think having that kind of attitude is awesome. But I think I always say natural curiosity wins out the day. And with that natural curiosity, you can talk to clients, get confidence from them and get to those POCs. Because the buck stops with you as CEO. So I use my network, I use my understanding of the industry and the problem set. And I also use the idea of like, let's align on a solution that provides value. Let's align on our vision of peace and harmony for this industry. So yeah, I was, you know, good to be lucky. Lucky to be good, I guess.

Well, I mean the network obviously helps and being in the industry helps also. Just understand what UICP is, how they think and what it's value to them. But maybe tell me a bit more about what was the pitch then like to that first pilot? Because once you've got pilots, once you've got customers, like things get easier and easier. But when you, you talk about getting maybe the first big one, like what did you actually sell to them? What was the ROI that you pitched?

100% like that first big client was. Let's coordinate data between two big players, your client and the general contractor. What ended up happening though during that pilot because they had this problem where they, you know, if you're the general contractor, you're being forced to use your client systems. There's a huge problem, the data is lost. Right. So the idea here was, hey, let's use these bots to extract data very quickly. I would say within the first two weeks. They're like, can we also enter data?

So I get that, but is the ROI then? Is it a time saved ROI or is it data management roi? Like what's the reason that they care about this?

The drive for show 100% is time saving. The theory is that the drive for show, yeah, you're going to save 30 person hours a week, 20 person hours a week, 50% hours a week. That, that's easy, quantifiable. They don't need to hire another project engineer. They don't go to the Philippines and hire data entry clerks or even hire folks in the Midwest like three or four people that they would have otherwise. By the way, pure cut. This takes time to do. Data coordination takes time to do with humans. The other side of it, I like to say the putt for dough. Where is a real return? It's on the latency of data. How. What does it cost you when data is late? What does it cost? A mistake, like if you make a mistake, fat finger or something. What is the cost of that and what's the opportunity Cost that you have a high end project manager, head down on a computer, trying to get things done that he shouldn't or she shouldn't be doing. And now AI orchestration and automation. How many hours am I going to return? And our current clients, you know, one to two man years or person years in the first 12 months of running. Brick is an average return on time, but the return on one mistake could be millions. If I screw up how to analyze a certificate of insurance or I miss an invoice or billing, you could be losing anywhere from half a million to $10 million a year on that. And great, great construction companies have disappeared because of mistakes like that.

Do you find it's easier to sell on the time saved or you find it's easier to sell in this potential mistake you won't make?

Oh, it's always easier to sell on the time saved. I think it's because, you know, we live in tech and we understand the nuances of that putt for dough moment. If you make a mistake, it's gonna cost you your company. It's a high risk business. But when they go in to justify it to a CEO or write the check, it's really easy to justify. Well, I was gonna hire Jenny or Johnny, but this is 1/4 the cost of Jenny or Johnny. And so that, that becomes just a very obvious thing to them. It also creates a ceiling and we can talk about like pricing strategies. When you return on time, it creates a ceiling at the max price of your average sales price.

That's right. Because what you can charge me 50% of what you otherwise would have paid. Something like that is probably a ceiling. Like you hire a human for 100k or pay me 50k. There's no.

Yeah. And I think with AI pricing, like we could run a seminar on this. AI pricing is hard and I think it's different. It's not per seat. I think it's different than other pricing models. Like as I get we'll speed through like where Brick is today. But the idea around how to price things like this, we have never been priced before. And as a go to market guy, it's really exciting to see that experimentation making pricing better. But it's also scary as an entrepreneur because the market is shifting so fast on how to, how to sell this.

Because you're a go to market CEO, I want to just talk about a few go to market things and then we'll, we're going to shift because I'm sure the, the post geni moment is a new, new inflection point. Like when you, you're talking there, would you say you have like different buyers, like the buyer who's going to use your product and stuff and maybe the economic buyer that's going to kind of approve and sign. Is that, is that true in terms of the setup for you?

Yeah. Let's talk about our go to market. We're highly account based. You know, I actually wrote a book called the book on account Based Marketing. The first thing is everybody's a niche marketer. Only great companies know it. So know thyself and know your icp, but know your ICP at a layer not. I sell construction companies. Understand the psychographic, the firmographic. That is going to be the fastest closing rate.

What does that look like for you? Like how specific is that?

For example, oh my goodness, is there a new cfo? Did the CFO just get hired? I mean we were doing this before anybody was tracking signals. Did they just win a new project? Are they multi office and then we score them like all this information was available by scraping way back playback. This is not a new thing. Did require AI, requires hard work. I ran my first ABM program in Excel. I don't know why everybody's so focused on buying, spending more money on marketing tech. But the idea here is like you got to get very specific. So you start with industry, start with firmographic. And yes, that's your list. Let's say that's 100,000 companies. They will all eventually buy from you. You have to believe that because they're your ICP and you're building the product for them. It's who's at the top of the list that week, that month, that quarter that does something psychographically that will pop you to the beginning. So if it's a new CFO boom, is it a new office boom, Is it a new whatever. Is it a new CEO? Is it a new cio? Is the cio? You know, if the CFO is outside of industry, that actually gives them more points in our company because that means, hey, they've heard of stuff like Brick. You know, maybe if they're from another construction company, they may never still not know about brick. So.

And the new, the new CEO or new person in of its own is because it just brings change. Like new people bring changes. That kind of their thinking.

Yeah, he's thinking. The number one signal for us though is growth, financial growth. So 85. It was not a great, like very scientific survey, but we did a survey within our client base and over 85% of the people responded. We're growing over 20% year on year, which is a lot for a kind of a traditional industry. Growth brings waste. Growth brings the need for more heads. Growth brings exposure of how bad your processes are today. So that's probably our number one psychographic signal. And we track growth in a couple of different ways. Permits pulled because they're construction. We track growth on employee hires, on LinkedIn, which lots of folks do just to understand like what is their book of business. Once we understand their book of business is growing, they become a target. Now below that is the Persona. And I think Pablo, you nailed it. There's. I call it the door opener. The champion, the economic buyer, the person writing the check. But you always have to know your challenger who's going to, who's going to cut your legs out from under you. And I think you know, happy ear salespeople for always forget. How do I identify the person Using experience, muscle memory, what have you that's going to kibosh this thing.

We have tens of thousands of people who have followed the show. Are you one of those people? You want to be a part of the group, you want to be a part of those tens of thousands of followers. So hit the follow button. It's very rare, I must admit. Like, you know, I, I obviously talk to founders all the time. The champion is like a key thing that most founders have in mind. Who's going to be my champion? That's something they've learned already. They understand economic buyer. It's probably the second one that they tend to learn. But challenger is a very rare thing that comes up for like the ones that you didn't get. Why was it and rarely is this idea of a challenger mentioned.

And you know, I love, I love go to marketing. You see a lineup. I will say isolated, redcue. That's the one way of doing it. But you got it. You have to put that person, you have to expose that person quickly. We get into like the inside baseball.

And I'd love to actually I think this is, this is great stuff. And frankly every founder wants to know more about go to market. So I'm more than happy to jump into this.

Oh yeah, no, I. So Persona identification, like let's say you go in there, you have to have this muscle memory. Let's say you're a lot of startups are founder led sales, right. In a lot of cases. And by the way, I think that's the number one mistake of a founder. Even if you're not a great salesperson, you got to Learn to sell. Because hiring, you know, I've seen it. Oh, we just hired the salesperson and they'll take care of it. Look, no, you can't outsource revenue, so you have to do it yourself at the beginning. And I think when you get in front of clients, maybe you get nervous or what have you. If you're not a natural salesperson, fine, you'll learn how to do that. Who cares? But when you get into that room, it's all about people. It has nothing to do with you. Like, you could throw out the ICP stuff. You could throw all the scientific. Forget about Salesforce marketo, all the tech we buy. It's about people. And when you get into that room, you need to have some muscle memory of who is going to be your friend, who's going to be your enemy, who's going to be the one that really gets excited. So let's say hypothetically, and it's true for brick mainly, the young person that is doing all this bad work may be our door opener. Meaning I'm a project manager and I'm being told to do all this. Double data entry into accounting, owner mandated systems, whatever. Let me find tech that orchestrates this. And that's our door opener. So hypothetically, our door openers are usually under the age of 35, has a decent education, wants to grow their career using technology as a backbone for that. You see that because they have different certifications that they might show up on their LinkedIn. They're a great door opener. Door opener comes in. They can't be my champion. How can they be my champion? They're 30 years old, they're brand new to the company, what have you. Then you identify in that rule who's the champion, who has the biggest thing to gain from this. In our case, it's usually the cfo, right? Responsible for P L. Anybody that's responsible for P L has the biggest thing to get. So I'm like, okay, piano, find that P L person. Now you then talk to the P and L person and you really get a report. They're your champ. If you're lucky enough that the P&L and is also an economic buyer, you're. You're in, right? Sometimes. Generally it's not the case. Generally there's either a group that's the economic buyer. That's the scariest thing right now. It's kind of group think consensus, or it's the CEO or somebody else coo somebody else. So let's say I find the person that has the most to gain now I need to identify who can write the check. And I think people. This is the number one thing that people fail on is, you know, we're raised, maybe in Canada, it's true more than in the US we're raised not to talk about money. I remember my parents like you like, it's. It's a sin. It's like embarrassing. You don't talk about money, talk about money. You got to go in and say, who has the money? Who can you write the check? I have no problem being that bold. I'm like, who's going to write this check? Whose name is on the check? And I. You have to find that out. And then you find out who has the most to lose from this deal. That's the one thing people always have happy years. They don't want to talk about that. They're like, my, I'm so good, my software is so great, My product's so great. Everybody can win every digital transformation. There will be a loser. There will be. I'm sorry. And to pretend that there's not is foolhardy. Find out who's losing. I'll give you a great example. We have this great opportunity and I learned this hard way, but this is two companies back. This is not brick. We go through this whole process. We're amazing. We're in. We have the economic buyer identified. We didn't realize was the CIO was trying to develop software that we were trying to sell them. The CIO had built a fiefdom, had a great budget, felt like he was a, you know, software executive from within a construction company. And we were taking that away. We're stealing that from him. We were taking that away from you. And he, at the last minute, kibosh a deal we had worked on. And this is the old days. This is my first, the first gig. You know, this probably, probably an eight figure deal for us because he sold big erp, right? And he just like right at the end, like swiped it. And that only happens to you once. Like, you're like, you're like, this is my year. This is my whole year. It's gone. Because this guy wanted to build this off, that person still employed by the company has 400 engineers working for him.

And is that still like when you think about for break now, who is that challenger? Typically, is it still a CIO?

Less so since gen AI pivoted in 23. That's less so before it was, yeah, 100%. Once software became productized and the CIO lost the ability to build which was very common in our industry, build versus buy once it became, you know, the cloud came out and now eventually AI, that was the only refuge they really had which is if I want, like if I don't want to just be the network printer guy, I got to build software. I don't. And I also don't want to just manage somebody else's software package. Right. So AI orchestration is what we call it now. And it's, it's a combination of you know, an MCP server or set of servers and, and you know, robots that are fully articulated and artificial intelligence to think and have instinct and all of this stuff. It's exciting to them to want to build that. And it feels like it's buildable because of rat plate and lovable and all these other solutions. So you want to be careful. Now there's two CIOs, one that say this is something I can build internally and give myself some job security. Because that's what it boils down to, right? So there's still a little bit the enemy, the challenger. But it's getting better now because I think everybody thinks with the dollar and dream and log into replit, I can build a company. And then they find out after a month it's like it's not really true. And they need people like us to come in so they're more of the friend. But yeah, definitely it was the blocker for many years.

Let's go deep on another part of go to market then which is kind of this top of funnel piece of abm, right? Account based marketing, like you have the roles now. My presumption is you're basically trying to find door openers and maybe champions as well. You've talked about prioritization because you've got your list. But now how do you go after them? How do you get them to open the email or take the call or the meeting or whatever it might be.

You know, believe it or not, email is still our number one channel. I'll talk a little bit about that. With the new tools you can hyper personalize an email chain, right? So the idea that you can not just like nobody want there's a line, nobody wants your newsletter, right? The, the information needs to be so specific to them it seems eerie. And before we used to have to handcraft that. Like before AI generated AI, we'd handcraft that. And you know I had 100 new marketers that at Procore like we would be typing, okay, we need hyper specific to these hundred A level accounts. Now you can do that at scale. So I think email being our number one channel is it's going to be true for a while. Having that message be tailored, even if it's just to title, having that subject line being tailored, being very specific on the FOMO effect, saying things like so and so is using us, which is competitor playing into that little bit of fear or you know, whether fear of missing out. So you get email going. That's. I think that's a big part of it. I think that's the carpet bombing approach. Think about it before the allies come in on the Normandy beach carpet bomb. But there's other sides of it now. Like the concept of, you know, we used to call it webinars for one. You need content. It can't just be emails. You need an offer. And so the offer can be a generative, you know, ebook or what have you. That's eerily like what they need or a webinar. And it's, it's interesting for folks. It doesn't take more than 20 minutes to like get out a webinar. But if you can get the one account, you know, like we used to do webinars like airport projects in the Southeast. Have you won one? You should join this webinar if you have. We are going after one account. That's who we're going after. They just won an airport project. So I call a webinar. I don't need a thousand person at my webinar. I need one person that's going to buy from me.

Are you literally doing webinars? I assume you don't show how many participants there are where there's just like one participant there. Crazy. That's called a demo, by the way. In other words.

Yeah, it's basically exactly. You've just got a low, low cost demo. So you get this. You, you use everything you can now live events. Pre Covid was like a huge channel for us as well, I'm proud to say. I think we've been to one trade show this year. I hate trade shows. And I think what trade shows have become is a way like a boondoggle for people to go and show up and then you feel like you have to be there.

Well, it's interesting you say that because I've been noticing many people going to events and at least they're saying they're closing deals at events. So I'm actually surprised that you're saying it's not something you're investing much into.

It's not that you're not going to close a Deal. The question is, could you have closed it through another means or method?

Correct.

I love affinity events. Affinity events are events you owe. Right? You know, independent event activation. Are they cheaper? I think they are. I mean, Even I spent 20 if I got a box of the Chargers game and invited 10 people to come for 20 grand and I had to go to World of Concrete, believe it or not, that's an actual trade check. It cost me 50 and I got that deal at a higher ASP than on the floor of World of Concrete. I mean, it's simple ROI math. Affinity events are so much better than trade shows. They're so much better than trade shows. Now there are shows people go to. That's fine. I think if you have a booth and you pop it up and it's a low cost employee or BDR or AE and territory, great. But if I think the days of shipping six executives to go to like, right, whatever. And like, you know, take everybody out of pocket for a week, do m massive construction of boots.

It's a huge lift. It is a huge lift. It's true.

Unless you're a multinational company with money to burn. Like, look, the world has also changed. Growth at all cost is not what people are looking for. They're looking for cash efficiency. And I just don't see trade shows as cash efficient, especially for top funnel. If you're meeting people at a trade show that's for your event and you didn't know who they were before the event, you're really bad at this. You shouldn't be in there. Like, you should know who they are. Like, that's ridiculous. Like Top of Final Discovery is not for trade shows. It should be mid funnel. Anyway, so we go back in and we track an engagement score. We track everything. How long do they look at our videos? Did they show up in the webinar? Do they sign up, what have you? Something crosses an engagement level. We still have BDRs. We actually have half as many BDRs and sales are up 60% this year. So we're getting more and more efficient. BDRs go in, knock down the meeting and then we pass it on to an AE traditional kind of funnel after that, our close rates from time to closing is 45 days. So we have an extremely strong time to closing. I tell people that it's an Affinity stat because 80% of the sales processes already happen before the first meeting sat. If they, if they're coming in cold, cold, it's a really long process.

What's the conversion rate like? What's The SQL to demo, demo to close kind of rates.

I would say from I have to look at this last quarter, but from first meeting sat it's 10%. So 1 in 10 will sign something after first meeting sat. So that's pretty decent. When I say meeting sat though, I'm careful on this thing. Are they sales qualified? Are their sales accepted?

Yes, exactly.

Is it a demo? Like I kind of don't love that model. I'm more like marketing qualified. Sales qualified account. If I give a salesperson a marketing qualified account, meaning it's it's in tam, it's I. It's not just tam, it's serviceable in icp and I hand them a meeting with a Persona that should be a door opener or a champion or an economic buyer. You best believe that person better sign. That's I hate SQL, you know. Is it so do they have budget now? Nobody has budget now you go find the budget. It's your job. Like that's the whole point. You know, you're on an order taker find the deal. It's a sensitive subject with me, but.

I like it though. I like it.

Yeah. Post first demo side, it's 10%. Got you or meeting saddle call meeting.

That was a great tangent into go to market. Appreciate you for, for taking me down that, that rabbit hole. Let's maybe jump through the story a little bit and go to kind of the, you know, let's call it 2023. Right. So ChatGPT comes out end of 22 gen AI is happening. What's happening in IBRIC, you know, over the last two years.

You know, it's so, so funny. So you know, from 21 to 23 we added a new product. So we were an RPA company fundamentally in 2018, say 2019 to 2021, then we did our series B and our series B was in the roaring twenties. And they said, you know, you got to use this RPA technology to do something fintech related. That's where everybody is. That's what we want. That's what our investors want it. So we created for a short window a finte that basically it was like more or less FP&A, I would call it forecast to pay. Meaning like you were forecasting spend and then you were paying for it. What I realized in fintech over Those, you know, 16, 18 months, it's a very high churn product. Fintech products are extremely high churn. They're not sticky because in some ways they're experimentational. They're like going in and they're like, oh, is this good? Maybe I could just do it in Excel. You know, my bank has a service. And so it was a very high churn product. And good to be lucky. Lucky to be good. I say that again, we could discontinue that product. It was high growth, high churn. Like, it was like, it felt like a revolving door. Money would come in, money would go out. It was extremely frustrating. And we went back to our RPA roots at the same intersection as AI was coming up. And so, you know, you go back to the social media companies, not that I mentioned the company earlier, but we grab a copy of Llama, you know, from our friends at Meta and we said, how do we take Llama and create a model for us? And that was kind of the beginning. It was more or less a skunk works project. And then, how do you make Llama? How do you make Generative the brain for the robot? How do you make Generative the robot writer? How do you. How does a robot write a robot?

This is kind of. This agentic AI kind of wave.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you, you know, you probably know that I have opinions right now for. I hate the term agent because I think agent means everything and nothing at all at the same time. I'm huge into the term AI orchestration. Like, I can't stress enough. It's like, you know, Brick is an AI orchestration. We have our own agents, we have our own digital workers, robots, whatever you want to call them. But we also have. We live in reality. Some solutions are going to be better than, like, I'm not going to recreate Gamma. Like, Gamma's a gray. For those that don't know, it's like a generative PowerPoint builder. I want to use Gamma. I want to use the best. I want to use mid journey as part of my AI orchestration, you know, so I have an orchestration that's lead to quote for physical industry companies, like construction companies, Lead to quote needs a proposal. I don't want to write a proposal generator that prints to PDF. So Arch Station is Switzerland. We are going to use the best nodes to execute. But at its core, the engine, the brain, the graph, the thinking language is what is at the core of brain. And so, you know, coming out of 23, we had an ontology that was second to none. We gave real meaning to data because we were so focused on this industry and we needed that ontology for robots to work. So now we have an ontology, good grade. So we have basic language, we have the arms, we have the action bots that can now be controlled. We then invented a thinking program, a thought process. And that's. That was really kind of the big moment. I don't know if I want to bore your people, but problems in construction, but just a basic problem. You get an invoice, comes into email, AP clerk opens it up. There's no job number. Right? Human can think. How do I find out? Oh, Jimmy. Oh, he ordered that. Oh, he's on job. One, two, three. That's thinking. There's so many signals in this piece of paper that you can figure out. Robots initially were very deterministic that we couldn't think. So we'd raise a hand. I don't have a job number, which is like annoying. So now, for instance, we created this idea. Hey, identify that it's an invoice. Look at things like the person that bought it, the, the job site address. Where was it delivered, you know, when was it delivered? Look at the PO system and see was there a PO for it. Do things that make you think, like you're dealing with a human. That's the beginning of intelligence with thinking. That was a big part of what we released. And then most recently, the instinct, which is real intelligence. Educated guessing. It always obviously telling the human that it's an educated guess. But the idea here is that that's how we build these fully articulated digital workers.

So walk me through numbers a little bit. Like in the first iteration, 2019, how quickly did you get to like a million in revenue?

Yeah, we did within 12 months.

And then from that period till, you know, you got like 2000s, then you got the fintech piece, all that, like when you, what was happening, was revenue still growing, like very fast or was there kind of a stalling for that period?

That was definitely a stall because the money was going in as fast as it was going out. And we luckily still had the RPA product selling in the background, because that really was lifeblood. And you have to also remember 2023, nuclear winter, SVB goes out of business. It's no more free money. Interest rates are up, economy is contracting. We went down, let's say I think we riffed over 50%. We went from maybe 300 employees to 150 something in that range. That was a big moment. All of a sudden you got the plane. Now you hit turbulence. Now you're leveling this plane out. Part of the reason once you hit turbulence is like you got that bigger guy on the plane. You want to push out of the plane, he's like start dumping the luggage. That's where you got to get rid of the fintech body. That was one thing. That's how you could cut so much. And then you start looking at it. We're now eight figures or touching on eight figures. I. We don't give exact revenue numbers on these things, but you know where that lands, right?

How fast was that? That was my final question. How fast was that inflection point? Post gen AI, that's.

Oh, post gen AI. Yeah, three years, 2023, 20. Mid 26, maybe two. Yeah, yeah, two and a half, three years.

But you felt, I guess the question to you is like, did you feel like the new stuff with data orchestration and what you can do now with Genai was a real inflection pointing towards the demand, the demand pool.

It's amazing. For those that aren't here yet, I will tell you, get on board quickly. Not just with Brick, but with other things. You ain't seen nothing yet. Remember I talked about the PC. Like I went to companies, I literally went to construction companies in 1999 when I started my career arc as an implementations consultant or whatever that didn't embrace the PC at that time. Like, they're definitely gone. And at Procore not having embraced iPads or the cloud, like distributing software to the source, those companies are gone now. You don't embrace AI, you are gone. You are not a company in 2026. They have to understand this is not, this is not. You know, people talk about an AI bubble and they talk about, is this fugazi? It's like, no, this is, this is something. And this is bigger than the cloud. Much bigger than the cloud, I'll tell you that. And almost as larger, if not larger than the PC revolution. Right. So this is 2026 will be an interesting year, but an exciting one.

Perfect. Well, listen, let's stop it there. I'll ask the three questions we always end on. The first one is, when did you personally feel like you'd found true product market fit?

I never feel like I have two. Product market fit? What are you talking about? Only the paranoid I keep on refining. I mean, you don't want to change things too much. It's like staying in shape. Like you, you got, you got to work out every day. Product market fit is a daily workout. You don't run those five miles, you're going to get big. You got it. Like, to ever say you've arrived at product market fit in my mind is crazy.

Was there ever a time where you thought things might just Click. Completely fail.

Same question every day. What do you mean I don't sleep? I thought I already started with only the paranoids are out. Every day I feel like a failure. What are you talking about? I have fear of failure. Intense fear. And it haunts you. One day I will retire and not worry about that. Maybe I'll take up a dollar. Fear of failure? Yeah. No, Every day you're, you're, it's a new adventure. I think that there is a balance, like health wise. That's why I think for CEOs and CEO entrepreneurs, self care is so important. Like self care is real. Like you, you know, I run self care is real. You're going to feel like you're failing. If you're at 0 to 1, 1 to 100, whatever. You're always going to feel like you're failing. You're always feeling like you missed an opportunity, you've made a mistake, there's always a competitor coming to eat your lunch, right? The idea here is you take care of yourself. But yeah, I feel good, but not that great.

And what would be like your number one piece of advice for an early stage founder looking for product market fit?

It's a great question. I think you find your passion, you find your purpose. I think that it's interesting. It's really. If you don't love the industries you're going to serve and you don't love the problem you're going to solve, it's going to be really, really hard to find product market fit because it's not going to be in your soul. I think getting to product market fit is an essence of your being, a completion of your as a person in the the world of your work life. It's like finding your wife, like it's finding your significant other. It's that important, it's that meaningful. You feel it in your heart, you know, Find your passion, find your purpose. If you're trying to find product market fit in an industry you don't care about or a problem you don't really care about, you just think there's money in it. You're pooched. Find a new one. I say find your passion, find your purpose.

Awesome. Well, Basim, it's been great having you on the show, man. Thanks for taking the time.

Thank you. Have a great one. Cheers. Stay warm.

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