Go-to-Network Is the New Go-to-Market with David Connors, CEO of The Swarm

Welcome to AI for Founders. I am Ryan Estes. Today we're joined by David Connors, co founder and CEO of the Swarm. David's company is rewriting the B2B playbook with one bold idea. Go to Network is the new Go To Market. Since launching in 2021, the swarm has raised nearly 8 million to help sales and revenue teams uncover and activate the warm intros already hiding inside their networks. With the freemium SaaS model and a fast growing base of mid market and enterprise SaaS customers, the swarm is turning connections into conversions and cold outreach into a thing of the past. David's favorite AI tools, Replit and Bolt. His mission, make networks your most powerful growth channel. Let's dive into the future of relationship driven sales in the age of AI. But first, this episode is brought to you by Kitcaster, the podcast booking platform for high growth founders. You've built something amazing. Now it's time to talk about it. Kitcaster gets you interviewed on top podcasts so you can grow your audience, build trust and drive revenue. Ready to share your story? Visit kitcaster.com and apply today.

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David, how are you today?

Great, thanks for having me.

Absolutely. I'm really excited to talk to you for a couple of reasons. You just had a big launch on product Product hunt number one product of the day. You have just an incredible tool called the Swarm. Now before we talk about that, I just like to get your temperature on AI right now. What particularly excites you about AI or is there kind of a. A product that particularly has your interest?

I, I'm always sort of going back and forth with the different LLMs. I think like perplexity is one that I'm looking the most at right now, but Claude is, is one that I find myself keep coming back to as well. So trying to just stay on top of all the different releases as they come out. But as you know, just as my, my go to assistant, right. Just asking questions, brainstorming ideas, drafting content, just 100 different things throughout the day. And I think the other fun thing we've been tinkering with is prototyping. So using like Replit or Lovable to spin up some prototypes and sort of using that as our front end team to spin up these customer facing prototypes that we can really quickly get feedback on. That's what I'm really enjoying with AI is moving right now.

Yeah, it's interesting and I like that you say prototyping. I prefer the technical term Vibe coding. But it's so fun when you're evaluating these tools because, like you said, like replit, bolt, lovable, they all kind of have little attributes that are different. Or you're talking about LLMs, you know, perplexity, Claude GPT, Google's up there, Gemini's in there. What are you looking for? What gives one tool an edge over the other? Are you kind of going back and forth?

I find it so hard to stay on top of all of the different, like, technical releases. I honestly find myself just going to my peers and people I trust and asking them, what are you guys using? And then doing that on a cadence of every week, every month, and just seeing what are the latest tools people are liking. What's better for more creative kind of, you know, brainstorming type stuff. What's better for more in the weeds, technical delivery of things. But yeah, that's, that's how I'm doing. Just sort of staying close to my network and kind of understanding what, what they're using, who the people I trust and respect admire, what, what are they using. You know.

Totally with everything having a subscription attached to it, it's. I feel like a little bit anxious about it all the time. You know, I have the same thing kind of the, the Council of Experts. I'm like, are you sure? Lovable. I only have so many credits. Like, I'm going to go in. So, you know, there's always. There's an extreme FOMO with tools right now, but it is kind of fun to go in there and see how each tool differentiates.

Yeah, Yeah. I think it's good to remember as well that we are living in a, you know, a very, I don't want to say disjointed, but like there's, there's different realities for different parts of the world. And I think living in the Bay Area and you're in Denver, you're in a tech hub, you're kind of at the forefront of a lot of this innovation. You're already kind of living in the future in a lot of ways. And so whilst it may feel like we are falling behind constantly and not like, able to keep up, we're sure you're still in the top 1% or even top 01% of people who are actually experimenting and using these tools. So I try to at least sort of give myself a little bit of grace that I don't need to be internal at OpenAI, know exactly what the latest model is going to be doing or what's coming up, as long as I'm sort of staying somewhat on top of it. I think, you know, we're doing a good job.

Yeah. There is a feeling that if you're not getting the, the leaked OpenAI memo first, that you're missing something, you know. But to your point, you know, there's a. There's a great vibe coding meetup group in Denver that's small, but the people that are in it are very, very high quality, from serial entrepreneurs to senior programmers to absolute novices. And the cool thing about the group is there's just this spirit and enthusiasm where they're like, hey, what can we do with this stuff? Yeah, you know, and, and everybody shares that and everybody's opinion is really kind of like, democratized because the tools are so powerful, you know, to your point, you can spin up these, like, you can get your idea on into somebody's hands and they can tinker with it really, really quick. So it's pretty cool.

Really cool. Yeah. Yeah. I think we're living in a very interesting age. This sort of transition from, you know, relying on a team of engineers to, to build something that's going to take months or years to now, one person without any technical experience, being able to spin up an end over the weekend. It's pretty incredible. And it's only getting better and better, obviously. So that's where it's like, where's it going to be six months, 12 months, 18 months from now? It's going to be very different, 100% right now. Yeah.

Yeah. And, you know, the, I suppose the, the downside of that is it's hard to find when there's a, a serious tool, like when there's something that's like, seriously supported. It's. It's a, it's a company. You have to kind of vet it. It's, you know, I'm a little bit more delicate, like putting in contact information because it is so fast to spin up. So when I look at your tool in particular, you know, you guys launched, like I mentioned, a great product hunt launch, but right out of the gate, like, you've got some heavy hitters that you're already associated, you know, with HubSpot integration. There is clay integration, there's, you know, Gmail integration, LinkedIn integration. So for me, when I'm evaluating a tool right on face value, that's going to be a big indicator of the tool can be trusted. Now I'd like to kind of transition and start talking about the Swarm, because it looks so cool and I have so many questions. You know, one I'd love to know kind of the problem you're solving, but I listened to you on another podcast and you said, goto network is the new go to market. So I'd love to kind of hear and understand what you meant by that.

Yeah. So we see this go to network motion as the natural successor to the historical predictable revenue playbook. So kind of dialing the clock back. Right. 10, 15 years. First, popularized by Salesforce, predictable revenue playbook was all about scaling up the number of touch points that you had with your prospective customers. So hiring a lot of STRs or BDRs to do outbound campaigns that were cold calling, cold emailing, and, you know, sort of getting to this point, whereas then popularizing this spray and pray motion. Right. We're just increasing the volume as much as you can now. We had some tools then that started to make this easier and easier. Somebody on sales engagement tools like Outreach and Salesloft. You then had Apollo I.O. come along with their bundling of data and outreach, and then Clay comes along to then massively give these data to all of these different salespeople and sales teams. And now you have these AI agents who are autonomously sending out thousands of emails at a time and allowing these salespeople to reach a thousand customers in a day. And that reaches this saturation point where the buyers are suddenly. Well, not suddenly just over time, that the buyers are inundated with all of this noise. Okay. And that's kind of the situation we're in now, where the predictable revenue playbook just doesn't work anymore because buyers have so many undifferentiated emails and voicemails that they're just ignoring it. And this is what Mark Koskogo put as the great ignore, which is the era that we're in now. The great ignore, Right. Where everyone is just ignoring. You're seeing email tools starting to push things to spam or to another folder where you don't even see it anymore. So how do you get the buyer's attention? And how do you get a buyer to actually want to engage with you as a salesperson? And actually comes back to what I said before, which is how, as a buyer, do you want to learn about new tools? And what do you do when you enter the buying cycle and it's you ask your peers, you ask your communities, you go to your WhatsApp group where other founders are hanging out, or you go to the meetups to meet other people who are interested in kind of what you're doing, or to have a similar problem. And you ask them, right? So you ask your peers, your communities, you ask your network. And this is where this idea of this go to network motion comes in, where as a company you are fully orchestrating your network to support your revenue. So what that means is one initially mapping your extended network. So it's not just your LinkedIn connections, it's all of your team and investors networks, all of your partners and customers and advisors and vendors networks. Anyone who you can use to ask for an intro to support a deal that's in pipeline, to multi thread, to influence, to back channel. There's all kinds of different applications and use cases. But the core concept here is that for the first time you're intentionally orchestrating your network and not just relying on serendipity and happenstance, that at the right time someone remembers that they know someone at this target account that they should probably go and talk to. So it's really moving away from this spray and pray mass outbound, where all the buyers are just ignoring anything that comes into their inbox and moving to a much more trusted way. That's actually kind of going back a little bit to the enterprise sales motion of maybe 20, 30 years ago where you build relationships with, with, with people. As more of a long term perspective versus thinking about the, you know, this quarter, how are we going to close as many deals as possible and be more transactional? It's kind of more of a longer term perspective and it's a bit of a shift, you know, from that has to happen from the executive level down, really from the board level down. But we're starting to see more and more companies adopt it and kind of take on that longer term perspective. And then the results, you know, speak for themselves. Which happy to talk to you about the results. Both conversion meetings, win rates and retention are all way higher than if you're doing the alternative sort of cold outbound approach.

Yeah. Before we do that, explain exactly how it works.

Sure. So if you use the swarm, you can either use it in clay directly or you can use our, our app. What we do is map your company's network and look at the employees and investors of your firm. And then we look through everyone's previous colleagues that they've overlapped with, look at college overlaps, look at community memberships, and start building this relationship graph of your company. And then we score all of those connections to rank whether they're a weak connection, familiar or strong. And then you have this database of all of your relationships as a firm that you can then go and leverage typically the way people then use it. A great workflow is then to say here's our target accounts that we're trying to prospect into. Where do we have warm intro paths finding those? You know, maybe it's 20, maybe it's 30, maybe it's 50% of our target accounts. We have a warm intro path. In an example might be your VP of finance used to overlap with the CFO of this target account for a long time they were to start up together. That's a really high chance you're going to know each other. So that's the route that you take through the VP of finance to that cfo and then you're able to get that introduction and that meeting on the calendar and that's going to convert a lot higher. So we provide the data to unlock all of those use cases and it's kind of a good way to think about us versus people in relationship data platform. And we're now integrating, as you mentioned, with a lot of the other tools that folks use every day, both within their CRM as well as clay. And we'll be launching with a bunch more tools this year as well.

Okay, so if I'm thinking about my, my contacts data, the ones that come to mind are like LinkedIn for sure, Gmail, Google Workspace, contacts in my phone, probably prioritized by who I'm texting, calendar information. Are all these data points considered into like this score and ranking?

They can be. The way we think about it is there's, there's public connections and there's private connections. Public is what we do out of the box. So we map a company's network and that's more of the previous colleagues that everyone's overlapped with. The college overlaps the shared investors and we find all your investors portfolio.