SaaStr CRO Confidential: Howard Lerman, Founder & CEO @ Roam | Founder-led Sales

SaaStr fans, welcome to another episode of the CRO Confidential podcast. I'm your host, Sam Blonde, back with another incredible guest that I will introduce in just a moment. Prior to doing that, bit of a programming note. We typically have sales leaders on, uh, this show, as the name would suggest, CRO Confidential. Um, we're doing a bit of a miniseries and we have been, uh, receiving a lot of feedback and a lot of demand for this concept of founder-led sales and founder-led customer acquisition. So we're gonna do a bit of a miniseries with a couple founders, and we are coming out with a bang. So today our guest is Howard Lerman. Howard was the founder and CEO of Yext, a company that he took public a number of years ago. He now is starting a new company called Roam. I think we're about a year into that new project. Howard, I'm just thrilled to have you here and welcome to the pod.

Glad to be here, Sam.

So I will quickly tell the story of how I met Howard, who's a Miami resident along with me. I was having coffee with San Francisco resident who's actually going to be a show on this podcast as well. His name is Colin. He's the CEO at Omni, and he was telling me about this incredible product that they just deployed called Roam and that I should definitely reach out. I reached out to Howard, who is the CEO Went over to Howard's office, met in person in Miami, and I was just blown away by the product demo and understand why this other founder, Colin, who is the former product lead at Looker, and so has sort of like history and knowing what incredible products look like, was also blown away. So let's let's start there before we jump into acquiring your first set of customers. Howard would love to just learn a little bit about the business. What is Rome?

Roam is an all-in-one cloud headquarters. It makes companies more productive with fewer and quicker and faster meetings. It makes them more connected by bringing the company together, the entire distributed company together under one roof, and it helps save them money with our unique pricing model with a compound startup, if you will, with 3 today and soon to be 5 or 6 different apps for the price of one.

Amazing. And for those of you that are listening, I was truly blown away by the product demo and would encourage you to go check it out. I think at this point, Howard, you are in a bit of a closed beta, but you do have a lot of paying customers. And so to set this sort of like baseline and where we'll be talking a lot of for this pod, how many paying customers do you have today in this closed beta? And then we'll sort of start from zero to getting to where we are today.

You know, let me just take a step back and say we're not trying to add paid customers as fast as possible right now. That's really not our objective. Our objective is actually to provide an amazing product and to have super high net retention from those that convert to paying customers. As of yesterday, when I last checked, we had 182 paying customers and about 4,000 paid active members. We've only been adding new customers for about 3 and a half months here. We started on January 1st, so we're happy about the pace at which we've seen that happen. But once again, you know, that's not our intention at all. Growth is not what we're trying to do. We're trying to build out the product and really get good enough to get to— to be able to get to general availability, which we hope will happen later this fall.

Awesome. And so we've sort of gone from zero to near a couple hundred paying customers. Understand that's not the primary focus of the business, but you do need to have customers to learn a lot of feedback about the product and what sort of is the primary focus. You're in a bit of a luxury position that you've built something that there's a lot of demand and a waitlist for.

Yeah.

Others may or may not be in that position where they're not sort of like customer acquisition constrained. So let's talk about how you've been So successful at this. You started this business. Howard, when did you start Roam? I know you mentioned you started acquiring customers beginning of this year, but how far into the company are we?

Well, you know, let me take a step back and just give a little context around the whole thing. So I ran, I started Yext in 2006. I ran it for 15 and a half years. I took it public in 2017. After 5 and a half years and 22 earnings calls and 8 appearances on CNBC, I got a little sick of explaining to hedge fund investors why EPS was off a 10th of a point quarter over quarter, and decided that I wanted to go back and be an inventor again and be a zero-to-one, to use a phrase, inventor or innovator. Yext had over 1,500 people when I was running the company, and we had always had in-office and sort of, if you've ever been to downtown Manhattan, you've seen our building in the Meatpacking District. We always made big investments in real estate. So I, you know, and this helped with culture, this helped with speed. If you needed something done, you'd run right over to the person and you'd get it done in 2 seconds. And, you know, when the pandemic struck, we moved to Zoom and Slack like everybody else. And frankly, when we moved to Zoom and Slack, Sam, we totally lost our speed and everything became very intentional and less serendipitous. And so the things that used to take 2 people 5 minutes, like standing together right now, Ended up being scheduled for Zoom calls next week for 60 minutes with 8 people. So we slowed down, we lost productivity, we lost the feeling of connectedness. And, you know, so one day I was actually setting up a Zoom and, you know, you're adding all the people in the email calendar invite, and I forgot to add someone. And at that moment, I realized that if you forget to add someone to a calendar invite in a distributed world, that person is disconnected and detethered and they don't exist. So I had this idea, which was, what if there were a bird's eye view of all of the people in a company, almost like a Marauder's Map from Harry Potter, if you ever read that. And it kind of gives you a sense of where everyone is. It's a shared view that everyone can see. And, and if you needed to talk to someone, you could tap them on the shoulder, you could walk over to them. And there'd be different sort of formats for being able to interact. You know, if you think of a real world office, you have this ability to walk inside of it and see who's there right now and get a sense of the energy. You can see which specific people are talking to which specific people and if necessary jump in. And so we made Roam to help bring together all these people into one HQ. And, you know, it's funny if you think about what happened. Zoom was the first company to solve the video conferencing technology problem, and boy, they did a good job. And if you think about video conferencing technology before Zoom. It was awful. Nothing ever worked. And Zoom was the first company to solve the technical problem. But after the pandemic, everybody basically rearranged their workflow entirely around Zoom. And so now you have back-to-back-to-back Zoom calls just like this one all day long. And, you know, and so we've, we've all adopted this unnatural workflow. And so what we need to get back to, you know, there's all this debate about the future of work, whether it's going to be hybrid, whether it's going to be in the office, whether it's going to be remote. And frankly, at Roam, we think I think that's all the wrong question because 100% of scaled companies are distributed and, you know, they have people everywhere. Yext had people from Berlin to Beijing. I'm sure, Sam, all of your companies had people distributed in various offices across, you know, the country and the world. And so, you know—

Even Founders Fund.

Even Founders Fund. And so what you need to get back to and what company— the challenge companies need to solve is not whether people are gonna be allowed to work from home on Fridays or not. That's kind of a juvenile question. The challenge companies need to solve is how can you get the whole company working together in one HQ as if everybody were in one HQ from anywhere. And that's the challenge we've set out to solve at Roam with our Cloud Headquarters.

Value prop is, uh, uh, very strong and definitely resonating. Um, a big, um, well, a little bit of frustration towards the end of Brex was— and Brex remained distributed as you described— um, was just like waking up and having back-to-back Zoom meetings all day long, just like a packed calendar.

And I know, I know people that would, that would drive to the office, sit in their actual office, and then do Zoom calls with people on a different floor in the same office. It's kind of silly. Yeah.

So you have this, uh, awesome idea, you start building product. Let's, let's revisit the timeline. When, when did you sort of form Roam and start building product?

Well, the day I left Yext was the day I founded Roam. And, you know, it's funny, everyone gives you this advice, take some time off, You know, Howard, you ran a public company, you know, billion-dollar-plus IPO, all this stuff. I literally started the company the next day. And go ahead.

And when was this? What was the time?

It was on March 26th, 2022.

Okay, so we're a year and a month in.

Yep.

And you, I imagine, start building product, having potentially conversations. So sort of like back to the customer interactions, when were the first conversations with customers that you started having?

Well, let me just take a step back and say that the first customer for Roam was myself. And I think that one of the really, really most important things that any founder can do, and I've seen Paul Graham say this a bunch of times, the stuff that you use yourself as the founder tends to make the best product. And, you know, it's been fun for me because frankly, you know, Yext, I love Yext. I didn't get— I was not a marketer, so I didn't get to use the listings product, didn't get to use the knowledge graph in the same way. We could pitch this and have this vision for folks, but ultimately it was the brand like Taco Bell or Morgan Stanley that ended up using the product. We were a B2B SaaS company, not a B2B2C or B2C, you know, consumer company. At Roam, I'm, you know, I'm the target customer. And so the first product, the MVP we built was for ourselves. You know, do we like it? And the cool thing about that is you don't ship anything unless you like it, because if it doesn't meet your standard and you don't use it, then nobody else is gonna use it. So, you know, we started using it for some stuff we were messing around with. We messed around with this kind of AI music app just as a side hustle, just for fun. And we were using this Roam Cloud headquarters to make stuff. And so a couple of people saw it and they're like, oh, I'd like to try that for my company. So we gave it to a few other people in alpha and really had the full intent of this, this vision for building a cloud headquarters, but not trying to add customers and just get feedback from a few people that we really knew. One of the companies is AcuityMD. They're a fast-growing medical device CRM company. We know the CTO there really well. He used to work at Yext. And so you know, their company was one of the first early adopters. A couple other early, you know, call it 30 to 50 person companies started using Roam. And, um, and we didn't do any marketing. We haven't done any marketing and we haven't done any outbound. It's all just kind of been folks using the product. And again, we are shipping like crazy. And for the past, I guess, 56 weeks that we've been out there, we've had 56 different releases and, you know, continued to pack in improvements and features. Uh, each week at a time. But the idea has been make a product we like, make a feature we like, and if we like it, it meets our high standards, then maybe it's good enough for our customers.

And you mentioned a couple folks, um, I think you, you, uh, even said one's name, AcuityMD, that there's a handful of customers that you put in this alpha. Who were these people? How'd you know them?

You know, it's actually really funny. We don't even know how some of them found us. I think, you know, it's interesting with Roam, you know, you put on a 30 or 40 or 50 person company and somebody's using it at home and their spouse sees it and they're like, that looks cool. And I actually heard of a story just yesterday where someone, you know, signed up for the waitlist, went to our site and was like, oh, you know, my spouse is at a company that started using Roam and said it's awesome. And so I looked at it and I want to try it too. And so that's kind of how we've gone. And I think that's how people have found out about this a little bit. And we didn't really intentionally go after anybody. The other thing I would say is that, and this is advice for any founder or CRO, it's good to throw stuff against the wall and experiment. Sam, we run experiments constantly. And this isn't just for product experiments, it's in go-to-market. And I know you're a super expert in this. So we're always kind of throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks, because we don't want to decide ahead of time, oh, Roam is going to work for X vertical. and force it to happen. Instead, we would, we would be biased towards, you know, running a test to, to go to all the verticals and see which ones kind of have a, have some stickiness, and then go deeper into those that look promising.

For sure. I think that's the concept of sort of like casting a wide net and seeing where the market pull is coming from. And then over time, you, you can focus additional resources where you're, you're finding that, that pull existing. And so it sounds like that's what you've done versus being sort of deliberate about we're building for this specific vertical and this specific segment. And so then, Howard, it sounds like you've taken a different approach from what many do, which is I hear people talk a lot about sort of like a set of design customers where we pick like 8 or 10 companies, we put them in this alpha and we sort of like build this product together and we're constantly getting feedback and trying to make the product successful and then sort of like expanding there. It sounds like you didn't have that plan and that you're— you just sort of served the customers that came to you and were open to using the product, but you weren't deliberate about who those folks were. Is that the right interpretation?

That is the correct interpretation. I— let me add a little color to that, which is I like to say, always talk— I mean, I'm talking to customers all the time trying to learn from them, and I listen to customers. We have a— in Rome, we have different room types And one of the types of room we have is like a genius bar, support bar where customers can come into our cloud headquarters and get live support and we chat with them. So I'm chatting with probably on the order of maybe 50 to 100 customers per, on an average day. Now, I said something really carefully, which is listen to customers' problems, but do not listen to their solutions because this is the old faster horse thing. You know, Henry Ford once said, if he listened to his customer solutions, he would have built them a faster— they would ask for a faster horse. What they're trying to solve for is speed, but they didn't necessarily conceive of an internal combustion engine, which at the time was capable of, you know, propelling people at a certain speed as a complete alternative to the horse. So, you know, you want to understand the pain and problems your customers are having, but then it's incumbent upon the founders to actually come up with a solution that customers can't necessarily see. and connect the dots. It doesn't mean that, that they don't ever have good ideas. It just means that it's not like a consulting project where you sit there with them in this design reference thing and then hack something together for them, especially if you do that for a big company, by the way. And we can talk about that because I've actually pushed away a lot of large organizations that want to use Roam but then have very bespoke needs. And we're not ready to kind of, you know, if you were to bring on a Wall Street— if we were to bring on a Wall Street bank right now, for example, it would suck up our entire R&D effort for 3 years and we would just make them some custom thing that might not fit other people. So that's the balance that you have to strike when you're, when you're doing this kind of thing. And you are absolutely right that we, we like to take an opinionated approach to our product. And, and that might not always look like what someone can come up with, a customer by themselves, we're going to do things differently.

There are 2 things that resonate that you just touched on. And they resonate with me, in part because at Brex, I observed Enrique, who is co-CEO, basically building a startup within a startup. Brex launched this sort of upmarket expense management product called Empower, which was almost like forming a new business. It was certainly forming a new product. And the 2 things that resonated that you said, one was that you spend a ton of time with customers and for months, 3 to 4 months. Enrique sort of like packed his calendar with upmarket CFOs, controllers, finance leaders, and I would join many of these calls. And so the, the like thing that resonated, or the takeaway here, is the amount of time that he— and it sounds like you— spent customer-facing, talking to customers. And then the second thing that resonated, and what I observed as well, was Enrique just developed a really fundamental understanding of their problems through these conversations. And over time, he He did incorporate a bit of a, what do you think about like this solution to that problem? But he was not asking for them, asking from them to design the solution itself. He was productizing the solution based off of the problem set that they were describing. And over time, he pressure tested a bit of sort of like the approach that he was planning on taking in developing the product. But they were not designing the product. The customers themselves were not designing the product. And so I think a couple important takeaways that certainly resonated with me based on that experience.

Couldn't agree with you more.

Um, okay, so, uh, we're like, good, good sort of like continuation along that, along those lines. Uh, how do you balance the time, the, the sort of like right time to put customers on the product with product readiness? You mentioned that you had this alpha, that there were a couple folks that were interested. How did you know like, okay, the product is actually ready to be used by these folks versus We're not there yet.

Well, I think that's a little bit of an intuitive thing. There's no exact kind of like you hit this milestone and then, you know, the other thing that's kind of happened, Sam, as we've gone is our vision for what Roam can be has expanded. So, you know, when we started off, we initially were able to support audio-only sort of experiences, which honestly, I kind of was inspired a little bit by Clubhouse, which I thought had kind of a neat format for the consumer side of things. And I was like, oh, well, this is cool. It was obviously a hit during the pandemic where everyone kind of had nothing to do all night. And so they just sat around on Clubhouse, which then kind of that format became incorporated into Twitter Spaces. And we were like, wait a minute, that could be useful in a company. And that's sort of where we started. And with the Marauder's Map for a company, if you will, for an office, and then we've added all these different room types. We've added features for group chat that make it possible for a company to not, if they want, use Slack, because we think we have a better approach for direct messaging in particular, where Slack is pretty weak. We have whiteboards we've added. So, you know, it turns out that in order to build a compound startup, as, as you know, from, from, you know, what you've experienced at Rippling, for example, or observed at Rippling, for example, there's just Because customers have a lot of demands. And so in order to have something you can bring to the market, this is the other thing, Sam. The average customer in Roam is in our product for 5.9 hours per day. That's the average. So you can imagine there are people that are zero, and then there are people that are at 12, 14, 15 hours a day. If someone is in your product for 15 hours a day, you better be delivering a freaking amazing experience because the minute that you don't deliver something awesome, they're pissed or they notice. And if it happens every minute over the course of 15 hours, you're gonna be delivering a lot of little kinks and stuff. And so this, this product has been so highly used and there's so many, you know, sort of rich features in, in, in the all-in-one solution for a cloud headquarters that we've wanted to make sure everything is kind of fully ironed out before we've, we've really brought it to market. So what we did concretely is the alpha ended at the end of last year. I said, if you want to continue, you, you know, you can pay. We have a 30-day free trial, and any company can, you know, that gets onboarded to Roam. And we've taken a totally unconventional approach on a lot of other things that I'd like to share with you as well, with regard to onboarding, with regard to how we're doing our demos. And, you know, 30-day free trial, and we've gotten to, uh, you know, any company can do it. And, uh, and so we ended the alpha, we started the beta, and we think the beta will probably go until September, October.

And, and so at the same time you described, uh, this is a heavily utilized product. People live in it for an average of 5+ hours a day up to, you know, 15 hours a day, uh, for the people working with your schedule. And but at the same time, like you described the importance of having like a product that is well-built and working and really, really great product experience. At the same time, you don't— I don't think you want it to be absolutely perfect. Like, like you, you want to balance sort of shipping product with the delightful experience that you're describing. Any sort of like philosophy with which you take that approach?

Well, I come back to the idea that if we don't like something ourselves, we won't ship it. So we're customer zero. And being able to live in our own product every day, we live in our own cloud headquarters. You know, if you come to our cloud HQ at 10 PM last night, you would see probably 12 or 13 of our inventors working to ship something together. And so being able to kind of, I don't even like to use the phrase dogfooding because we just use it. It's not even like we're doing it to fake it. It's just, it's like what we do. And so we actually have a process by which in our, we release something to what we call our alpha version, which goes to us and a couple other companies. And we sort of use it for a couple weeks and make it better and better and better and better. And only after it's made it through our alpha, then we put it into our beta, which gets shipped to our, you know, call it 180 other beta customers that would use it. And so there's kind of a 2-step process by Which we first conceive of something, then we alpha it ourselves for— we build it, we alpha it ourselves for, call it, 1 or 2 weeks, and then it'll make it— we'll merge it into beta and then give it to those customers.

Awesome. You referenced that, uh, you had this alpha period. You then, at the beginning, around the turn of this year, you converted into a, uh, paid— or excuse me, a free trial that was a 30-day trial, and then now you're in this paid beta. Any insight into how you determined when the right time to do that So you had folks that were not paying, they were on an alpha, you were getting a bunch of product.

Here's what I'm going to cut you off on this one because I have a very strong philosophy on don't give stuff away for free. I think free— by the way, we're talking B2B here. Come on. Like if it's B2C, yeah, everything is free and then you make your money through advertising and maybe subscriptions with Twitter Blue or something like that. But you know, that's only after you have a dominant consumer brand. We're talking B2B. And let me tell you, There is an enormous— and I've seen in my career like over and over and over again, a huge sample bias when you give something away for free and freeloaders that have no intention whatsoever of ever buying anything, but they're glad to use your product for free as long as you'll give it to them. And they actually, not only will they never pay you, they also give you bad feedback. So it was kind of interesting. We had a segment of customers in our alpha period that I highly suspected fit this mold. We gave alpha for free. And as I, you know, they were not in the United States, they were, you know, they didn't, it couldn't be that high margin of a company. They used Roam super heavily. And then as soon as it became time to, you know, charge someone, then they're just not going to pay. And so I, from day one we started Roam, we've had a philosophy of, hey, we'll let you try it for free so that you can see if you like But I think a freemium model in general, which by the way, this was— we took a contrarian approach here and we took a contrarian approach on a couple other things too. Every expert in the world said, oh, Roam is a viral product. You ought to make a free version and have a freemium kind of model like Zoom. Well, it turns out that Zoom went after a very different customer segment to get started and they're more like calling. This is a cloud headquarters. And so our strategy also informs a top-down approach to onboarding, which you don't see in a lot of kind of productivity software companies. But we've taken a contrarian approach, and I think that other companies ought to do the same thing when they think about how to onboard a company to their product. Call the founder and get the whole company to use it and to try it. Let them try it. And if they like it, they'll pay you. It's really just not that complicated. And to try to— and if you do something freemium, kind of you're, you're competing with yourself. You create the free monster where you've got this freemium thing, and then you spend a lot of time trying to come up with a differentiated feature that people are willing to pay for, and you agonize about that. And so, you know, we just said, hey, we're gonna have a free trial. Anybody can try it for free if they make it through our waitlist, and we'll put them on, and then we're gonna invest really heavily in concierge service and support to top-down onboard the whole company, design their space, be there live with them, because that investment in talking to the customers makes us smarter. It's not a cost, it's an investment.

All right, uh, that makes a lot of sense. I think there's also something that is, uh, sort of the, the mindset with which one, uh, sort of appreciates a free product versus a product that they are paying for. Um, and sort of like psychologically, there is maybe more of an appreciation for something that, uh, costs money that you're paying for. Um, and also a bit of like the concept of skin in the game where you want the company to be successful. And so as the founder, you'll join the Roam onboarding call and make sure that others understand how to use the product if it's something that you're paying for versus something you're trying for free.

It's all about expectations management. And if you look at our website right now, the only page we have on our website, we have an About Us And we have a, we have a pricing page. And what we've said is this is our pricing and everyone pays the same amount. And we did something kind of interesting too, because we, we went with this usage-based pricing model, which you don't see a lot in SaaS, which is obviously usually prepaid annual seats. We went with monthly active users, which by the way is how Slack got started. But after the Salesforce acquisition, they nixed it. And so now you have to pay upfront for the year and the kind of Salesforce more traditional sales model. But we basically said, here's the price, everyone's going to pay the same amount. And by the way, here's the price for next year too. And it goes up a little bit. And so this is actually what Bloomberg did. If you study, now they're a super premium kind of thing, but if you read how they price terminals, everyone pays the same amount for the terminal and they kind of inform you of what that price is going to be next year so that you can build that in. It's no surprise at the end of the year when it becomes comes in negotiation for more budget or a higher price. It's just, it's there. And then at the end of this year, we'll review the price, we'll reveal the price for the following year. And we'll just kind of do that systematically. So everyone knows exactly what's coming always.

That's a, that's a good segue. You have this sort of static pricing that you've described, every customer pays the exact same amount. And you also, at least today, are taking a purely product-led growth approach. You do not have salespeople, you do have sort like group webinars that people can come join and see demos of the product and interact with folks at your company, but it is not a traditional sales model. And so with that in mind, I know you mentioned the focus of the company today is not expanding this sort of like number of paying customers in the beta. That said, you are acquiring customers and you do have some demand gen channels in place. Let's talk a little bit about what the first sort of like formal demand gen channel you put in place was.

Well, let me, let me actually say that it's kind of— so first off, there's no formal demand gen channel except the founder being the BDR. And Sam, I think you'll appreciate this more than anyone, or SDR, whatever you want to call it. I think the whole BDR model is kind of flipped in companies. And, you know, Yext had a lot of BDRs and we've raised a lot of salespeople over the years, probably over our 15-year career, probably 3,000 to 4,000 people came through our sales system. And one thing I learned, particularly in enterprise, is that the best BDR, the most— the best BDRs are the most senior people because they're a phone call away and can easily meet people and the board. And so I really think founders ought to think about how to construct their board and/or advisors in a way that they can just make them the BDRs to kind of get going and to get those high-level contacts. Because the fact of the matter is, A BDR is going to have a really tough time unless they're super clever, you know, reaching a founder. I'm sure you have a lot of opinions about this, but I just think, you know, the founders and CEOs and boards and advisors need to take the accountability for inbound demand gen. So I suppose you might suggest that that was our first official demand gen channel was us.

Interesting. So you have both internal and external, external being sort of like investors, friends of the company, these like evangelists. That are in the marketplace talking about Roam, and that is generating demand for you, driving folks to the— I think it's a weekly webinar, but driving folks to the webinar to view the product and ultimately onboard as customers. You are doing some things though, and maybe this is along those lines, like Howard, I know you're somewhat active on social media. I don't know if you have like a formal strategy around that. You're also throwing these amazing events. That, uh, again, I don't know if the intention of the event is customer acquisition, but it is at least, um, something that's really positive for brand. And so anything as like takeaways for, you know, a company that is now a little over a year old in terms of like, you know, these are some things that actually have been super effective.

I, I think, I think events— so first off, I think an advisor channel is the best way to get leads because you could find someone amazing, and a lot of people are willing to be advisors for stock, stock options in the company. And you put the advisors to— we actually, we worked advisors really hard. We had a, you know, an advisory board and they were able to make, you know, high-level introductions to executives at various places. And that's how you're able to get someone that's been— I'm just making this up— the former CMO of PepsiCo to make introductions to the current team, that kind of thing. So I strongly recommend, you know, an advisor, whether it's a board or network, whatever you want to call it, it's just for BDR, it's lead gen, it's super high-end introduction service. So that's the first channel that I personally would go after. In fact, when I started Yext, the very first thing I did, we were selling to gyms and I called the founder and president of URSA, which is the trade organization for gyms. And this was in 2006 and he sent me a fax back. He faxed me back and said, I'm in. And this is really old school. And he is now, you know, 78, 80. But I made him an advisor to Yext and that helped us sign up every gym because he just made a phone call. He's a phone call away from everybody. So, so go for targeted advisors, particularly in certain verticals. It really works well if you, you know, want to get into healthcare, have a healthcare advisor. If you're gonna go into, you know, consumer, have a consumer advisor. That's, that's what I strongly recommend there. Then you mentioned events. Events, I think, are the highest ROI way to reach customers in B2B. If you can, if you can, it doesn't have to be much. It's not that expensive to put on a dinner. That's the secret.

That's awesome. A little bit to unpack there. Let's start with the first thing that you mentioned. I think the traditional path is that you hire SDRs to generate demand. These are oftentimes like myself, 22, 23-year-old recent college graduates that come in and write a poorly worded email and blast it out to a database. Where 30% of the emails bounce. And what you were saying is, like, rather than focusing resources and, uh, uh, uh, money on that type of a program, get more senior advisors, pay them, um, you know, some equity.

The same, the same amount. Take that same dollar amount, that same investment, and go after it. Here's the thing, especially, by the way, one extra trick is in Europe. European, uh, executives in technology are very willing to do this kind of thing, and they don't get the same opportunities that Americans do from American companies. Yeah.

It's an awesome takeaway and, and potentially something that might, uh, drive different strategy for folks that are listening, which is if you're thinking about, you know, very early stage hiring a 22, 23-year-old BDR, like maybe focus the resources and attention that you would need to make that successful with acquiring some of these advisors that would make sense, like Howard described. And then, you talked a little bit about events also. I'm excited for one later in May in New York. How do you think about the success of these? Are you— I think you've done one in Miami, you'll do one in San Francisco, you've got one in New York. Do you think about success just in terms of Do you think about it in terms of like, we want to acquire a certain number of customers? It would be helpful to learn a bit about how you think about those things.

You know, it all starts in, you know, yes, we use events heavily. In fact, we would throw an event every year where we'd have probably 5,000 people come to our marquee event called Onward. The metric that we would use is ACV in the room, how much ACV or ARR, whatever metric you use, is showing up to your event. And that, you know, you look at the pipeline and then you look at the existing customers. I think it— the thing you said about how you feel after the event, 100% of the time people feel good about the event. I've never heard someone say though, you go like, oh, let's go to the Warriors game and there's— we got a box, we brought the customer. How was it? Oh, it was awesome. We felt great about it. But did it advance the business? And that's the question you need to be asking. And so I think the key is who you invite. Don't invite a bunch of random people. Only invite— and at Rome, at our events, we're focused on those people that have come through the tour that seem qualified to us and have bent. And then potentially some people that those people will be interested in meeting. And so you have to put that together and create a good mix and have some good energy. And then you want to make it fun, but you also have to get your message across. And So, you know, I've always incorporated live product demos into our, into our events. Like, it's not— we're not just gonna come and have dinner and drinks. Like, that's, that's not how this is gonna be. We want this to be informative and educational and inspiring. We want people to leave this feeling not just like they had a good time, but also kind of inspired about the company in a, in a, in a broader and in a, in a more enlightened kind of way.

I love the last part. One thing, one important, I think, thing about Roam is the demo is very interactive.

Yeah.

It is an exciting product to demo and to see a demo. And that's not necessarily true for all technology. And so maybe, Howard, an iteration on that. If you don't have sort of like an incredibly interactive product that would be exciting to demo at this event that you're hosting, you just talk about some things that are exciting, some dynamics about the company versus just like sitting around having dinner. And so there is something that is focused on the business itself, whether it is a demo. If the demo makes sense, that's great. If not, talk a little bit about maybe you have like an incredible story around how—

Or bring in a customer to tell the story. I mean, it's better to have a customer tell the story, bring in a great speaker, try to make the audience engaged with people that they're going to want to hear from. And then through the lens of, you know, their success with what you're doing and try to kind of build the community of people that are excited about it too.

And you've now done this, um, you are unique, uh, there are very few folks on their second startup, first one, uh, taken public for, you know, billions of dollars in terms of an exit. And, uh, so you've now done this 2 times over a number of years. Um, anything that you have tried that was less successful? So we've talked about the things that have sort of worked. Um, what either like What mistakes have you made or things have you tried that didn't work might save some cycles for those that are listening?

Well, I've tried so many things, Sam, and I continue to try so many things. I am failing. We are failing constantly. We're testing stuff continuously. We don't have a rigid formal experimentation process like Google. I would say Apple doesn't have that. They kind of make stuff and see if it works, and if it doesn't, they'll move it along. One of the biggest failures of my career was a thing called Zone at Yext. It was a product that used a beacon. I don't know if you remember the beacons, the iBeacon protocol that Apple launched, that basically was this Bluetooth thing that could wake up your phone when you walked past it. It was like a near-field communication device. And this was a classic example, and I don't know why I let ourselves do this, of letting the technology, getting excited about a technology with no good use case. And so we like pushed, we created this super cool thing that, you know, could wake up your phone when you walked into a store and like it would wake it up and, you know, you could interact with it when you were in that exact particular place. And it was really a great example of, you know, a solution chasing a great technology as opposed to the other way around. And that was just, you know, a colossal fail on our part. It just didn't work. It was sort of like the rocket ship that blew up yesterday. But we we learn from it and we move on and we incorporate those learnings into new product development. One other thing I'll note is that we also, Sam, this isn't so much a failure, but it's an example of, and maybe this is a broader point I'll make, you have to be as a founder really careful about listening to the experienced people with the playbook. Because when they come in and they have their exact playbook for how to run things, It may have worked at a certain company, but if there were a playbook for how to just do everything all the time, there would be 100% of companies would be successful. Everyone just follow the playbook and bam, you're done. So when you make your company, you do have to be unique and that's okay. And the thing is, the experts and your board might not understand that. So it's really important for you to keep unique characteristics about, you know, how you specifically run sales or how you specifically do finance or how you specifically do product. The experts with their playbook that worked at, say, Salesforce or say HubSpot, that might not be able to be transplanted successfully into your companies. Parts of it will be, but you also have to find that right balance of keeping it to be true to your soul as you scale. Here's an example. You know, everyone said, okay, you know, a great idea for how to do demos is you do one-on-one demos. You want to be able to provide a customer with custom attention when they, when they request a demo on your site. Well, in February, Roam went viral on TikTok and it caused like 1,000 people, some huge number, not 1,000, but something like hundreds of companies to sign up for Roam on the waitlist. And it made us unable to handle the onslaught of requests we got. And so we couldn't do an interactive tour for everybody that came in. There's just, we didn't, we, and we didn't want to hire people to do it. We just, we just wanted to kind of So we ran an experiment, and what we did was we said, wait a minute, what if we created a group tour, kind of like visiting a college campus, and let people come in all at the same time from companies that didn't know each other? And that really went against the conventional wisdom of, hey, a one-on-one call is gonna have a higher conversion rate to get to onboarding than, you know, putting a bunch of people together. It'll make them feel like they're less important. You won't be able to get the, the, the true needs out of a customer. Well, Sam, it turned out that the percentage of people that chose to go on to the next step in our process went not quite, but almost doubled with the group tours. And we don't exactly know why, but it's a happy consequence of a random experiment. And so instead of trying to think about what could happen upfront and then make it happen, we just tried some stuff and it worked. And so therefore, we'll lean into that and keep doing some more stuff and keep trying some more stuff. We're running an experiment now. now, where instead of scheduling the group tour on our website, you can just click right into it right now. Just go to the site, enter Rome right now, and you're there, and we have guides waiting for you. And we tried that yesterday, and I don't know what's going to happen, but people definitely showed up right into our Rome Cloud headquarters, and they were like, whoa, this is cool. So we'll see what happens.

That's awesome. And my primary takeaway from what you just described is less about know, all companies out there should start trying group tours. It's more that you should be experimenting and maintaining this sort of like unique approach that is differentiated for your company and not trying to transplant some playbook that worked for a different business. We did a bunch of that at Brex. You know, I've posted about like sending bottles of champagne to founders and congratulating them on a fundraise. And now that converted to demos and worked really effectively for us. It doesn't mean everybody should be sending folks bottles of champagne. It means just like throw stuff against the wall, exactly what you're describing. One maybe sort of like tactical way of doing this is just do a contest. If you have folks, Howard, you have folks probably in your company that you would include in this. And if those that are listening, you have like a go-to-market organization, have a contest so you can come up with the best idea for a campaign, like, you know, sending bottles of champagne or doing group tours or whatever folks have ideas around, come up, you know, like do a couple hours where folks present their ideas and then decide which ones you want to test out. And, you know, sort of like crown some winners. And then again, this is like concept of throwing stuff up against the wall. That's a decent way of like getting going on it.

Couldn't agree more.

All right, uh, quick recap here. Um, so some things that have been really successful for Roam in terms of customer acquisition before sort of like acquiring the first set of customers. Um, one is this concept of like evangelists that exist that starts with the founder, um, and sort of like cascades to others in the company, to investors of the business, to the first set of customers, really evangelize those folks into sort of like customer acquisition machines. In addition, you have been really thoughtful about a group of advisors that you're giving equity grants to. And there's a bit of— trying to think of the right way to articulate this— something that's like unsaid perhaps, or maybe it even is said around, you know, you're receiving this grant in part to evangelize Roam and ultimately lead to the acquisition of additional customers, even if it's like, you know, deliberately explicit or not. And then the next thing that has been really effective is these events. The events, you are curating a crowd versus just like inviting anyone that wants to join. The crowd is users and potential users of the software. And maybe some like really cool guest speakers that will create sort of like demand to attend the event, and at that event make it interactive and make it centered around the business versus people talking about the NBA playoffs as we did before we joined this call, Howard. So I think that's that's a bit of the recap. Anything that I've left off. Anything to end off that you would like to end on?

The only thing I would end on, Sam, is to always trust your gut. There's a lot of experts out there. They know what's best for them, but only you know what's best for you.

I love it. That is a great place for us to end. Howard, I can't thank you enough for taking the time. Congratulations on just like this incredible progress that has taken place in a short amount of time, something like 13-plus months at this point from the time that you started this new business. Um, and I know that there's an incredibly exciting future for Roam. And again, thank you for your time. We'll see you all back here for the next episode of CRO Confidential. Everybody have a great rest of the day. Bye-bye.