#108 - Emir Atli - Co-Founder, HockeyStack - Attribution 2.0 is a GTM superpower

Sales, marketing, RevOps, and customer success. It's sink or swim out there, and yesterday's strategies and tactics won't help you today. This is Revenue Today, and I'm your host, Jared Robin. Join me as we interview top revenue leaders in our community to learn what steps we could take right now to help you scale more effectively. Revenue Today is sponsored by RevGenius and RevRoom, and we're on a mission to build trusted spaces for curious revenue professionals who are collaborating on the future of B2B GTM. Hello friends, welcome to another episode of Revenue Today. I'm your host Jared Robin, and I'm joined today with a special guest, my friend Amir Atli, co-founder of HockeyStack. What's going on?

Thanks for having me, Jared. It's always fun to talk with you.

I'm so excited about what you're building at HockeyStack. You've only been going, what, like 6 months now?

We have been building the product for the last 2 and a half years, but we built 2 different wrong products, but we always stick to the analytics space. And then like 9 months ago, we finally found our niche. And for the last 6 months, we have been playing it on, easy mode and we have been growing really fast. We added like 6 new team members last week. We have a healthy runway. We know what's working right now and we're just trying to scale it even further.

So you found— so you took about the first 2 years figuring out product market fit, is that right?

Yeah, we first started out as a like no-code alternative to Google Analytics. And then there are lots of products that are doing well in this market, but they're like pricing at $5 per month, $6 per month. And it's just not the thing that we wanted. We just wanted to build a, build the next big SaaS IPO. And with $5, $4 per month, it's really hard to do that. The other product that we built, like we pivoted into agencies and e-commerce businesses then with like advanced features. But then for agencies, they always wanted CSV export, team members, white labeling, all that stuff to really didn't matter for us. For e-commerce businesses, they just increase spend to get more conversions. They're not really into conversion optimization, all that stuff, demand gen. And then last thing that we tried is we contacted all the SaaS people that we know in our network and then asked like, what's wrong about your analytics stack right now? And they all said everything is distributed into 8 different tools and it's really hard to understand what's driving revenue. And then we added the revenue piece into the product that we had. And then boom, like we got a couple deals going and then we added more as we get more feedback. And then fast forward to now, we are serving all B2B industries with a like very easy to use tool. Setup is 5 to 10 minutes. We bring all your data, allow you to understand what's driving revenue.

Damn. It, it might take longer to set up a, a JavaScript for Google Analytics. Yeah. Right. Or approximately the same. The most fascinating thing about this story is if we backtrack 2 and a half years. Where are you living? How old are you?

Yeah, I was in high school back in Turkey. I was a nobody, 17-year-old. My co-founders were 16. We were like, we have been building stuff for the last 2 or 3 years. We built lots of products with my co-founder Bura. And then Bura and Arda, they were friends at school and they were like playing in a rock band. They built drones, all that stuff. And then Bura just put us all in a WhatsApp group and then we met there and then we started like Because it was a problem in our previous startup. It was a social media app, and analytics and retention was always a problem. So we knew there is something to do here. We just didn't know for whom and how. And then we started just building. And from that point on now, to now, we now have a working product. We dropped out, moved to SF. We just went to school for 2 months in US.

Did you even finish your first semester?

No, I did not.

More time coding and marketing than go to school.

Yeah, for 2 months I spent all my time in the library working and taking calls. As I said, like in our, in our podcast interview with you, I was in my dorm room. Um, I didn't have proper lighting, I didn't have a microphone, all that stuff.

But boy, how times have changed. Now it would have been Man, if you were able to get your tuition back and use that as seed funding, that probably would've helped.

Yeah. Fortunately I was more efficient, 100% like on scholarship. Um, yeah. Okay. I didn't pay a lot.

So now, now you're in the world of B2B SaaS with thousands of other players, right? Mm-hmm. Um, and, and you see how things work. Like what are companies getting wrong today with marketing?

Yeah, for marketing, lots of people are debating between different channels and different tactics. But for us, what worked is, and for lots of different companies, what worked is just being present on the feed every single day, whether it's LinkedIn, Google, YouTube, whatever the channels that you pick, just pick a couple, create the best content that you can, and then distribute it every single day. What we are doing is we are posting twice a day and it's, One of the first interview questions that I have for revenue-facing teams is like, are you able to, can you post twice a day on LinkedIn? And I'm picking people that have like personal brands for the first like 10, 15 team members. And you're doing that as well, which helps because the first couple people on the team will make or break the company. And if you have a personal brand, then we will get 10x out of the investment. Yeah. So the thing that we are doing is we are creating the best content that we can and distributing that every single time, every single day on different accounts. And then on Google, we are doing SEO. We are on the first page for relevant searches. For YouTube, we are distributing content on YouTube. So wherever you go, if you search for attribution, you will find Archistack. Whatever you do on LinkedIn, you will see us on comments, you will see our posts. All that stuff. And it's just a combination of the tactics and our GTM strategy is to be everywhere every day. So that's something that not, not a lot of people get.

I think you need to give yourself more credit cuz you're doing a lot of article writing. Mm-hmm. Right. Aren't you at like 1.5 million impressions through 6 months or something like that?

Yeah. For SEO, we started with Bottom funnel keywords and quickly scaled to 1 million impressions in like 6 months. As you said, we posted a lot, like 30, 40 articles to start with, and now we are not posting anymore. We are just optimizing the old articles. And we will be, we are like, we restructured the marketing team over here. We just, Obed just started as head of content and we switched to LinkedIn a bit because we had a good foundation for SEO. Now we are doing LinkedIn, YouTube, all that stuff, and we will be adding new team members for SEO to bring that to the next level. Yeah.

And it, it's It's also important to understand the types of content you put out, right? Because you could put out a couple pieces a day on all those channels and not do what you're doing. I mean, heck, I've done that before. Like, what, what, what, what, what type of content are you putting out? Because this is, this is interesting. Like, how is it talking to people?

Yeah, um, basically on my personal page, what I'm doing is I'm trying to create a balance between product posts and personal posts. So if I post about the product twice, I try to post about myself or something unrelated once, at least. And for the product, we are just like, we have use cases. We have a Notion doc with all the use cases that we can talk about. And then we are creating content based on that. It can be a customer testimonial about the use case, like video about me sharing what you can do with that feature, stuff like that. For personal posts, I'm sharing like, how am I hiring? How am I like motivating people? Stuff like that. And also we are doing a great job at feature launches because if you build something, even if it's a small addition to the product, if you build it, we created a couple teaser videos and hype people up and then launch the feature a couple weeks ago. And that really works well because now people are really looking forward to something. that comes from you. And another, I think something that is misunderstood by people, I posted about it on LinkedIn too. People think that nobody cares about you, nobody cares about your company, but like, for example, I care about you and then I want to see what you're up to as a person, what you do, what you're building, who you're hiring. I care about RevGenius too, because it's like, I don't know, I have some, I have a somewhat connection with you and the brand. It's not about like not caring about people. It's just about being interesting. For me, you are interesting. Your story is interesting, how you like got laid off and then created to like want to build a community during COVID All this stuff is interesting with me. You created that bond with me. And then now I'm interested in you. People think that nobody cares about you and you should be talking about the customer and prospect all the time, which is not true. People now are interested in us because, and nobody knows about this story, by the way, I shared it with you. Nobody knows that I'm 20. Even our team members, they didn't know that. And then after onboarding, they were like, oh, what's the story? How did the product come? All that stuff. So yeah, that's another misunderstood concept.

I mean, I don't think you give yourself enough credit, at least in that, for connecting with the problem that people have. And I certainly get it because I think People do care about you, and they care about you extremely. Like when when you hit that chord that they can empathize with naturally, right? Because you know maybe they were down and out at a certain time if you're going in that direction, or or they started at the bottom and were moving up. So there's some like some common threads, and people people love that that. But your content you posted something on LinkedIn. Which was like a mediocre graphic with an incredible message, um, where you had like 2 like alien-looking people hugging one another, and it was a marketer hugging HockeyStack.

Yeah.

Can you talk about that a bit? Like, this, this is, this is big stuff.

Yeah, this is awesome. Um, so yeah, that was about an ad creative. So also what I'm doing is it's like kind of all over the place. If you want me to go into a certain direction, I can talk about that specifically. But for this— Yeah. Specific thing, what I'm doing is I'm running our LinkedIn ads. And before running a LinkedIn ad, I'm posting about that on my personal profile to see if people engage with it. And that was an ad creative, which I thought about our demos. And every single demo is like, oh, I have been doing marketing for 20 years and this is the tool that I wanted to have in my early careers to prove my work to my managers. And when I thought about ad creatives, I thought about that hugging meme. A guy, like someone is hugging another one and then the one that's hugging the other guy is like crying and then hockey sack, maybe markers. So that's like, that's what I get from the demos. They're like, they have been waiting for a tool like this for a long time. And then finally we are bringing that to life.

Yeah. You understand your prospects, your customers' challenges. How were they doing it before you?

Yeah. And also it comes with like being young has some certain disadvantages, but like, because we started from zero, all we did was getting feedback and applying that because we didn't have any ego. Because like, if we can do, we could have done like, this is the feedback that we got from customers, but it's not, What we want to build. Instead, we like start from zero and build what customers wanted to have. So it's kind of an advantage. Turned out to be an advantage for us. What are they using right now is they are like looking into HubSpot, Salesforce, ad platforms, and then Google Analytics, and then trying to figure out who is like doing what. So those deals going forward on Salesforce, they could have come from. So like LinkedIn ads, the last point, last touchpoint can be LinkedIn ads to understand that they're going to Google Analytics or HubSpot. And then on Salesforce, they have the pipeline data. They're either bringing them all together on a spreadsheet, which is manual work. You should be doing that every single week to keep it accurate. Or they have a, if they're like, like, I don't know, 1,500 people company, they might have a data team. With a data team. Marketers go to data team and then ask, can you build this report? They'll build it in like 10 days. They get it back. If you want to change something, you go back to the developer team, data team, they change it, send it back to you, all that back and forth. Um, yeah, these are the couple ways that they're— or they're doing nothing. They just don't know.

Yeah, I mean, geez, man, what are some of the advantages of being so young building such— because This attribution challenge is arguably one of the biggest challenges in marketing and sales and in revenue. And you're dealing with it head-on, creating a solution that people want, and you haven't even graduated a semester of college. Like, you're so youthful. What are some of the advantages of being that young building such an important tool?

Yeah. I think the first one is, well, we just don't give up. And we don't have anything to lose compared to our competitors. They probably have, I don't know, a family. They cannot, for example, some of them are in Europe. And I think there's a big advantage in being in US. There's like talent, access to talent is easier, the network. In SF, I met with lots of people. So we, like, I moved from East Coast to SF. I made that decision in one day. And then from Turkey to here, I made the decision when I was like 10, probably with my father. So I have nothing to lose. And this is just what I do every single day. When I wake up, I wake up with this. When I sleep, I sleep with this. So it's really hard to compete with us because we just don't think about anything else. And it comes from being a kind of 20-year-old, I think. Because if you're 45, then you probably think of your children, your wife, all that stuff. We don't have that. The second one is we are obsessed with customer feedback. We don't have any ego. We have a vision. We have a big vision, but we get all the feedback we can and then apply that. I feel like if I was a marketer with 20 years of experience, I would just build whatever I want to some extent. And I might reject customer feedback because of my ego. And it's not a bad thing, it just comes with experience. Now I catch myself sometimes, like I'm really good at LinkedIn ads, for example, and I ignore some of the feedback that I get because of my ego too. And then— Yeah, we're just obsessed. With this. Like, I'm obsessed with whatever it's, it's, it can be funny, but I'm just obsessed with B2B customer data. I'm just like breathing this every single day.

And obsessed with being objective, right? Like when you remove the ego, you allow yourself to be objective.

Yes, exactly. Exactly.

Which is cool. Now, so the core team met on WhatsApp. You all are multiple peas in the same pod, but now you're bringing in other people. Yeah. How do you keep the culture of that no ego? And I know you're still like pretty small team, but you're probably starting to see some new dynamics, right? Um, from people that have previous experience. And I know your whole team. Heck, I, I know them very well. Um, And they're the best of the best and they're really great, but they have experience and they have a good amount of it. How do you balance that?

Um, Dee says hi, by the way. We were in a weekly call just before this. Um, so

Dee and myself, we've known each other for about 3 years, I believe. And, and what, what, what an incredible, incredibly kind and good at what he does person, right?

Exactly. He's really good at gifting.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, for us,

I'm waiting for my hockey stack temporary tattoo in the mail.

Yeah, my gift to you is on the way. Thank

you. Yeah,

for us, I think we were really good at bringing this to like from 0 to 1, but we need experience getting this from 1 to 100. Now, like, so far I've been doing all the demos. I was like on 35 calls on average for the last 4 months per week. Yeah.

Per week. Okay, good. I was going to say per day, that's tough.

Per week, yeah. This is like all demos, some networking, and I couldn't really handle that demand. So I needed someone with experience. And then also with hiring, we are like at 10 right now.

And, and first off, that was all inbound, right? And, and mostly from the SEO channel or mostly from the socials? It was, I mean, you are an attribution

company. Yeah, it was 85% LinkedIn and then 25% SEO, something like that. And I, when I say SEO,

who, and, and outta curiosity, who was, who was, who, where was their more qualified traffic?

Yeah, so it is complicated because when I say SEO, they still have seen a LinkedIn ad before. And I say SEO, it's like last touchpoint or last couple touchpoints is SEO. It was very similar because from SEO, we are like, we were mostly targeting bottom funnel keywords and mid funnel keywords. So we didn't target much top funnel, which helped with quality of leads. So it was really similar. Yeah. Back to your other question for the team. We wanted to bring people with lots of experience and who can be like, who can learn? Because attribution is not the end product for us. We are building something that's much bigger than that. That's going to be automating all the revenue operations for revenue-facing teams. Attribution is the biggest piece because now we have all the data that you can imagine from intent platforms, from CRM, from the website, from that platforms, and we can build applications on top of that. So think of the first layer as tracking data, second layer is visualizing data, and then third layer is building applications on top of it, like sending the data back to the platforms or sending data back to your sales platform to like automate this stuff. For the team, we just made sure that everyone believes in the same vision. And then people that we hire are the ones that can learn. on the way. So I made sure that, and then we asked like specific questions about like scenario that they didn't know and then they learned stuff like that. And then we had references from people like you, people that they worked with or people that like they know. Yeah, and basically we want them to believe in the same vision. We want people that learns and then we want people with experience because hiring And advisors and all the people that talk about you is just market signals. So, so far it was building the product, getting people know about the product. From this point on, as we go upmarket, it's just about giving the market a signal that this thing is growing. If I don't join this company now as a customer, as a team member, as an advisor, I will be missing out a huge opportunity. Yeah. And with every single hire that we bring in, with Obed, lots of people reached out, can I work here too? Lots of people reached out to be customers. Lots of people reached out to be an advisor or like just help in general. With Dee, it was the same too. Lots of people entered our pipeline because they know that if this guy joins this company, and it's a huge risk too, then there's something that's going on with this company. So that was our bigger vision in hiring. And how I make sure that they believe in the vision is I'm showing them videos of demos. Even before signing the contract, I shared about 10, 15 demo calls in which the other person was like blown away from the product. Yeah, that's the biggest piece. And then we have lots of testimonials.

Yeah, I mean, it starts with having a killer product and helping with a killer need. You know, one thing I'm really intrigued with as well is you've done a pretty good job at building your brand. Y'all aren't necessarily brand builders, but through consistent social and like a certain voice and, um, just connecting with people, it seems like you became brand builders, right?

Yeah, exactly. Brand building is not, for me at least, it's not like about colors that you pick or They have some value too, but it's more about creating connection and it's through social. You know it better too.

And connection of you as a person, right?

Yeah, connection as a person. So connection as a person and connecting with the brand too, because if you connect the product and use cases with a bigger vision, then they connect with the company too.

Do you think having a brand helps you quite a bit or a little bit with your return on ad spend, your inbound traffic, all of that?

Yeah, it is helping with everything. Even though a deal is like closed lost now, the other person either— it's like, I'm not making this up. Anyone can reach out and I can send a screenshot. If the deal is not closed one, 25, 30, maybe 50% of time, the other person either wants to work with us because they're impressed with the brand, they're impressed with what we're doing, or they want me as a consultant there for a couple of hours per month. And that's just because of the brand that we built. Sometimes they just take a demo to talk about what we do. On a call a couple of weeks ago, they were asking, like, we sold the first 15 minutes should be about discovery. And they did a discovery on us. Like they were asking, how did you build this live demo? How did you build this brand? How are you using LinkedIn? This is really impressing, all that stuff. And then they ended up buying HockeyStack too. But for the majority of the demo, they were not even interested in HockeyStack as a product. So it really helps in everything.

It's funny when there's a buzz about your brand, And you have a good reputation with that buzz. They just want to gravitate towards you.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And also, some companies create a really good brand buzz, but product doesn't follow. That's also really hard.

Yep. How have you been keeping the product up to par?

Yeah, so we have a really fast engineering team. Right now we have 2 developers and my 2 co-founders are also technical. So, so far we have been launching additions to the product every single day and like fixes every single— no, new additions to the product every single week and then bug fixes, quick additions every single day to our clients. So that's one, speed. And then one thing that we did really well is we actually built lots of stuff ourselves. So for example, live demo is We are not using any tool. It's just built by us. So that gives us really an opportunity to customize it and it gives us an opportunity to convey what we do. Because if you were using a tool, there's a limit to customize the dashboards there, or there's a limit because they're using your product. And then we built lots of stuff ourselves and it's just speed, making it easier to use. With us, you don't need to use any tool like Google Data Studio or anything like that. And then there's no limit to customizing it to the reports or customizing your dashboards.

Now we'll get into product. Like, are you PLG or are you a sales-led motion?

We were PLG, now we're sales-led.

Why'd you go back? So many people are going the other direction.

Yeah, because For us, it is kind of hard to— like, there's an investment that we do in the first 2 weeks to, like, help the customer get the most out of HockeyStack with, like, customizing their dashboards, creating the first initial dashboards ourselves so that they don't— the switching cost is zero. And with a trial, because it's free, they just somehow ignore that part and they just, like, want to use the product themselves. And then it's just time to value is longer that way. Now we onboard them, customize the dashboards in 1 day, 2 days. And then when they enter the dashboards, they see 4 different dashboards customized based on their preferences, based on what they want. And it's really easy to sell. We do have a pilot period, so they're not locked into an annual deal instead of a free trial or a freemium. We are doing a 3-month pilot in which they can opt out of the contract if they're not happy. And that's useful for lots of companies that we are working with.

Yeah, what I've seen is products that connect into multiple systems, there's exceptions, but that are flowing with data both ways, you don't want the customer to do it themselves.

Yeah.

A lot because it's not always intuitive, especially early on. And it's, and they're not going to be as fast as you, so they're not going to hit value.

Yeah. And don't get me wrong, like they can use a product with no-code, but it's just like first couple days are super important. But in like, I think in 9, 10 months towards the like Q2 of next year, we will probably do a PLG model with a freemium product. maybe probably one part of the product will be completely free and then they will use it. We are launching a free product this week to test it out. So, because I think there's a value for that, but you would need a much bigger team to handle that demand.

Well, yeah. And I guess, you know, you have Google Analytics that you could integrate For free, like why can't you do it with HockeyStack?

Yeah, with Google Analytics, they're like, the thing is Google Analytics doesn't get data from CRMs and ad platforms. With us, for example, one customer is using lead opportunity MQL SQL. Other customers using, I heard that last week, one customer was using set opportunity, basically set opportunity. Because the opportunity is not really good. So you cannot automate this part. There's like one person should be going into the dashboards and then changing the lifecycle stages. It's either us or them. We prefer to be in that part.

Do you think that you could create like a tutorial that helps them? Like, hey, this is where you map this field. Because you probably know that CRM might be The only place where you need extra attention, right? Mm-hmm.

Yeah, we do, we do have document— documentation and they can use it, but it's just now until September, we are just in a grow or die mode. Yeah. So we are trying to scale as fast as possible. Um, and until then we'll be keeping—

Well, what's faster? Is it, is it faster, uh, Bringing people on, or is it faster getting them into product and then use growth loops to get more people?

So now if we have a demo and then we have a second call one week later, during that period, we send the contract. If they're interested, we send the contract, they review it, they review our security documents, and the next call will be about like answering questions, concerns, and maybe having a CMO on the call too. And then after that, we pretty much either close the deal or have one more call and then close the deal. So it's like 2, 3 weeks of sales cycles and the average ACV is $30,000, $40,000. With a free trial, you have a demo, they talk with the team, get back to you after a week, they set up the trial. Trial is 2 weeks. Usually they want to extend it for another week. And it's just trial plus the demo, it takes— 4 weeks. A month. And after that, they will still review the trial dashboards and then get back to you after 2 weeks. It's just like 6 weeks.

Yeah. Makes sense. What percentage of pilots are converting to long-term?

Yeah, so far we have not issued a refund yet or no one opted out yet.

So 100%?

Yeah.

So you're also killing it on NRR. Like who, who are the next hires you make? Is, is it a customer success person?

Yeah. One more customer. Yeah. One more cus— we have a customer success manager. One more customer success manager will be joining in around 2 and a half weeks.

Nice.

Yeah. He's on like notice period and this person, if nothing goes wrong, This person was my implementation manager for a tool that we get for ourselves. So I know my experience was really good with this person. So I just reached out and I said, like, my experience was really good with you. I want our customers to experience a similar thing. This is what we do. This is how we go. We are backed by this, this, this people. And then he said, like, let's talk. And then we had a chat. Now it's going good. Good.

HubSpot. Just kidding.

No,

but, um, no, that's, that's awesome. And probably sales hires too to come.

Um, yeah. Or

are you doing outbound yet?

Yeah, this week we are starting outbound. Um, so far it was 100% inbound plus some, like, if people enter our live demo, it's gated, which is another, marketing sin. Our live demo is gated. And then when people opt in, like give out their email addresses, we are reaching out. And then it has like—

But do you need to do that because you have such good attribution?

But if you have the emails, we like reach out with a fun, funny template. I have a Spider-Man meme and it has a 65% conversion rate from live dimensions. to that template to demo. It's just like I'm taking a screenshot of their session on live demo. I can see where they clicked on, which company they're working for, company size, company industry, and then what they did on the website, which forms they submit. And then I take a screenshot, send it to them, say like, my Spider-Man senses started working with a Spider-Man meme. Do you want to see this same thing for your own visitors? And then 65, 75, 70% time they say yes. And we are just using this. We're not doing the cold outbound stuff yet. For sales, we will be probably looking for a new AE in a couple months as we put the process in the right place. What I'm going to invest in is content. So we will be looking for a content writer this month. And maybe we have a full-time designer, but maybe another video person. Specifically for video, motion graphics, animations.

It's an exciting time, man.

Yeah, it is. And for you, like you have worked with lots of different companies. What do you see in terms of reporting? You're on different advisory boards. What do you see? What are people having trouble with?

Outbound. People are having trouble with outbound.

Why do you think that is?

It's harder today than ever. Um, because every part of outbound is harder today than ever. There's more people going for the inboxes. Google makes it easier to land in spam. Um, there's more technical work needed on email. People are picking up their phone less than ever if you're cold calling them. Mm-hmm. So like the percentages are just lower across the board. You could optimize for delivery and get, um, Good delivery rates. You could get good open rates. Replies are down. Like, all the percentages are down across the board. And then you have sales engagement platforms that are contributing unintentionally to landing in spam by their best practices. They're saying, hey, you could send 250 emails a day from one email address without rotating them or anything. Yeah. Like, they say this. So you buy this product, which is a unicorn company, and you trust it. You know, it could, it could all go to shit. So like, I think the companies that are doing the best tend to have marketing involved a bit on outbound. Mm-hmm. You know, are more technical with outbound, have a more integrated strategy in the sense that they don't just put their reps on an island to do it themselves. Like, it's a team effort. With creating content, with creating campaigns and things to that effect. I think that we're also seeing the full-cycle rep come back again, which is kind of cool. Yeah. And, and it makes sense, right? Because what, you're gonna have 4 reps on an account? An SDR, an AE, that's to get in, and then, um, an account manager, which is your upsell person. Mm-hmm. And a customer success person. Wow, that, that $40,000 deal just became more expensive for you with your margins, right? So you better— so reps are going to be doing more. And CS people, why can't they upsell? Well, some, some of them can, some of them can't. Or why can't the AE stay with the account longer, right, to do that as well? So I think you'll see some more efficiencies there as well. But outbound, Is, uh, is a big thing. Um, and, and they're not, they're, they're not enabling their reps as well as possible. Mm-hmm. I think it, I think, I think the core starts even deeper than, than that, right? Like, there's a lot of me too products out there. Like, hey, I do that, me too. So like, if you're not enabling and you have a me too product versus you know, something that solves a true need, it's different. I, I think that people, um, are still not hitting their perfect ICP as well. Difference between ICP and perfect ICP, it's like a little more intent-driven, and it could be intent by how they interact with your content and stuff. That's good. But it could also be intent by how they're hiring. Like, if, if, um, you, you probably know exactly the title that you sell the most to. Maybe it's demand gen, right? And, um, if they have a demand gen person but not a team, maybe they're more likely to buy you. Or if they have a, you know, like, so reach out to that persona more. And I think, um, Set it up to reach outbound to the people that are the most likely to buy you this month. That's what I always say. Not the most likely to buy, like the most likely to buy this month, um, because a trigger of sorts happened or, or a combination of triggers happened, right? Where, where your product fits them like a glove today. Because of course Microsoft could buy you and, and Salesforce could buy you. But they may not buy you this month and you're in grow fast mode.

Yeah, I think less and less companies are into this 9-month, a year, like sales cycles. Everyone wants to have it this month or next month, which makes sense.

I mean, always. And you know what's funny with the 9-month sales cycles on like a $100,000 deal? Sometimes it takes 6 months to, to get a meeting and it's only a 3-month sales cycle once you do. Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Or, or you're working on an account for 9 months, I should say. Or, or you start and, and they still have a contract going for 6 months.

Yeah. And also on the—

So it's— yeah.

On the brand side, I feel like we have not tested this yet, but if I can see like who's sending the email. If I know the person who is doing outbound, if we have not talked yet, but I see him on LinkedIn, I see her on YouTube, whatever. I feel like I would be more willing to respond as well. Back to the brand building side.

Yeah, I think that personalization, that connection back and forth is big. And And I'm not gonna lie, when I do outbound, having Rev Genius behind me, it's like, it's a much easier thing. And it's, most of the people are in my community.

Yeah. It's not outbound.

I, it's

like texting.

No, it's like, yeah, I saw, I saw you leaning into here. Like, does it make sense to talk? Like, yeah, you've been top of mind.

Yeah. It's like texting, like, are you up for this? Something like that, rather than cold email.

Right, like, hey, I saw you sponsor this other community. Like, we haven't spoken yet. Should we talk?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I think like there's a couple of core things. Brand building is one, SEO is another one, and then like being everywhere every single day is the third one. If you get these 3 right, Exponential growth is the only way.

And having a product that actually solves a problem.

Yeah, and funny thing is like we were on a YC interview with 4 partners and they asked us, one of the interview questions was like, I have been seeing you everywhere, like what's up with this whole content game? Why are you producing this many content every single day, every single week? What's up with that? Is that really working? Even like people that you are not targeting, they still see you. And then at some point it's like, it works. That was the most surprising for me because the person that we talked was like really big name. And I, we are like targeting head of marketing, head of dimension, maybe CMOs too. But like a partner at Y Combinator? No, never.

That person's investing in companies that are targeting those things. That's why he sees you or she sees you. But okay, so you're getting from 0 to 1 now, and that's massive. What's next? Like, how do you see yourself getting from 1 to N?

7 months, our goal is to reach 12 million ARR end of August. Early September. From until that point, we will be like, right now we are tracking more data than anyone else, and we will be adding more tracking functionality. So a little bit of teaser, think of company pages, think of your own profile on LinkedIn, think of getting those touchpoints into the journey as well. Think of this podcast, think of this community. All that touchpoints we'll be tracking. Even more data, and we will allow people to use that data in their processes. Right now, we give the data, but it's up to the marketer or salespeople to act on the data. We will make that process automatic. So if you build an audience on Archistack, if you do something, we will be automating the parts to optimize your processes and then use it in your day-to-day. So 2 things. One is tracking more data, and the third is— second is building applications to automate the revenue processes. And then from 1 to 0, I think in terms of the product, it's this way. And in terms of sales, we will be focusing more on intent signals, as you said, because now as we track everything, we can see exactly which companies have the highest intent. And we will be making a better use of it with the team we have. So far it was all me, so I didn't have the bandwidth. But with the team that we have, and we will add new team members, we will be focusing more on intent and then doing outbound that way. In terms of marketing, we are building out Duflo, which is our— which is going to be our media company. With Obed, we are thinking of different categories of different series. So it'll be— Mm-hmm. In our product, we are getting all the data and you don't need to log into different places. You have all the data and it connects dots across different platforms. Even if you log into different platforms, you won't have to, you cannot connect the dots. With Flow, we are gonna duplicate that. So it's gonna be everything about B2B growth, sales, marketing, content marketing, all this stuff will be different categories. And I'm thinking of getting people on contract to create content as well, not just our team. And on top of that, I'm gonna, I want to, so far I have, I had my podcast, I have guests, but I want our team members to be an expert in the areas they belong to. So I will have more team members on my podcast, on our video series as a guest to position HockeyStack as an expert in the area. So that's a quick overview.

Are you, are you, are you gonna add attribution to the dark funnel? It's, you said podcast. LinkedIn is interesting because LinkedIn won't allow you with API. So you're probably doing something crafty, right?

With LinkedIn, so far we have, we can get like company engagement. We can see which companies are seeing which ads on which day and engaging. So that's some part of the dark funnel. And Chris Walker said it's, it cannot be done, but it's, we are doing it. And For the other parts, we'll be enlightening the dark funnel one step at a time. And actually I have a meeting with LinkedIn in 10 days.

And this is what we were talking about. Like there's no reason why the dark funnel has to be so dark.

Yeah, it is. It's not really dark anymore. It will be even less dark. And if you become a LinkedIn partner, which I think we'll, we'll we will have more data to work on. And maybe if they agree, we can work on other interesting stuff. There are lots of, and everyone should be like taking a deeper look into APIs that you use. With like Slack, there are lots of stuff that people don't know about the APIs. They give access to lots more. With LinkedIn, it's the same. With Facebook, it's the same. So we are diving deep into the APIs to find out what we can get.

So Twitter APIs I hear are easy or easier. And Slack APIs, I believe you could, Even on the free account, you could get data back to the first day, even though they don't allow you to, um, from the UI unless you up— upgrade, you could still pull it out since day one in like a raw file, right?

Yeah, exactly. And as we talked on the podcast episode on my podcast,

yeah,

to innovate, you need to break things sometimes. If you have watched, you gave an example.

You guess why?

Yeah, you need to give an example of Slack and Skr. Those are 2 really good examples that we are using every day now. But at first, they were not allowed. They were getting banned off App Store. Yeah, you need to ask why. And you need to break things sometimes.

Like, why can't you do that? Have you ever read the book The Innovation Stack?

I got it last week. You said, you said that.

Oh, read it. I got it. There's a couple cool anecdotes. If nothing else, it's going to motivate you to keep going in that direction you're going.

Yeah, I will read it for sure.

What, what KPIs are the most important to you right now?

Yeah, the first one is pipeline, pipeline value, and interested companies after the demo. That's the biggest one. For brand, it is like usual stuff like company page followers, our followers, and Flow subscribers. In general, what we're checking is how fast are we with marketing, with sales, with product. So with the life cycles of product development, and like how fast are we bringing new features to the market, how fast are we With new launches on the marketing side. All that stuff is really important for us. And yeah, ARR, all the usual stuff.

What's the North Star out of all of this?

North Star is customer satisfaction.

My man.

Yeah.

Pick a North Star that benefits your customers.

Exactly.

And everything will be good. What excites you the most about the future?

What excites me most about the future is, I think growth is the most exciting because now we are only like 1% there. And it is really exciting now. We cannot keep up with everything happening. We cannot keep up with demand. I cannot imagine one year from now. And that's really exciting for me. And also new team members. I'm learning a lot from Diya. I'm learning a lot from Obed. That's really exciting because I'm obsessed with learning. And we are learning, I'm learning from them, and they're learning probably from me and my co-founders and other team members. And just, we are going into the same vision. Normally you would learn from a mentor, but they're on their own way, you are on your own way. Now I'm learning and then we are going forward with the same goal. That's super exciting. And basically like the vision for the product is super exciting for me. I'm really excited about the new features that we are bringing. And with every feature, how we are going to create a buzz around it is really interesting and exciting for me.

What's the scariest stuff that you're going through right now?

I'm scared of scaling too fast, honestly. We needed this initial 7, 8 people. But from this point on, we need to be careful because scaling too fast, having 100+ team members is really a dream of every single founder. But if you add members too early or members who are not a great fit, it would be really like, it would hurt us a lot in terms of growth, in terms of the cost. So it's scary for me. And also, We are, lots of competitors and lots of other companies are copying us. That's not really scary, but kind of sad. Um, but yeah, these 3.

Now, would you, wouldn't you say like the dream of every founder is to have the most revenue per employee? Thinking about— Yeah,

yeah, yeah, of course. Being efficient is Awesome. But like, as I know— We're

in a new day, right?

Yeah. A couple years ago, wouldn't you want like, I don't know, a big company, efficient, profitable? I would want it. But you need to also, so far we have done a great job at like hiring the people that we really need now. From this point on, we will be extremely careful about who we hire. Because the first 20, 30 people will make or break the company. So hiring is scary for me.

This has been incredible, Amir. I'm sure we're gonna have more interviews along the way. This is just a snapshot today into where HockeyStack is, where you're at mentally, what you've been through, and what your views are today. I can't wait. Like we, we should do this again in like 6 months because you're growing so fast as a company, but as a person, right? Because—

Exactly. Yeah. And one thing that I'm really excited about is too, um, we start documenting everything. We create a documentary about a milestone we achieved and we are still like working on the video. Um, we are also documenting our journey to Like 12 million ARR right now, every single day. And I'm really excited about how that will turn out because now I will be able to go back to see how was I thinking 6 months ago, now what changed. And also the team, what we're working on, everything will be documented on video, which is super exciting for me. And it will be an example for other founders too, because I was looking for an example Of someone who did something like we want to do at maybe 19 years old, and I I couldn't find it. For younger people, it will be an example, and for other people just want to be a founder, it will be an example, and we'll be showing all the failures and success stories along the way. This is for like this will be in English, and for Turkish people because It's even harder there. In US, it's kind of easier. I also have a— now I also have a Turkish channel in which I'm sharing what I'm doing with my co-founder and our journey. That's also an exciting thing for the younger generation back in Turkey.

This is awesome, man. How could people get in touch with you and find out about HockeyStack?

Yeah, LinkedIn is the best place. You can search for HockeyStack or Emir. Emiratli.

It's E-M-I-R. Dude, thank you so much for coming and being a guest today. This has been awesome.

Thank you so much for having me.

Of course. And thank you, audience, for listening. Uh, this has been another episode of Revenue Today. If you liked what you heard, tell somebody, um, pass along. Uh, we'll be here next week and every week with Some of the best, newest, brightest, strongest revenue leaders in the space. Thank you again, Amir, for being our guest.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, friends, for joining me. That was another great episode of Revenue Today. If you're looking to listen to more episodes or for the show notes, go to revgenius.com. For all my friends in the Rev Genius community, it was awesome to spend this time with you. Please DM me any feedback or ideas for future podcasts in our Slack channel or on LinkedIn. If you're not in Rev Genius, join us. It's revgenius.com. It's free and it's fast to join and really for all levels of revenue professionals. For senior leaders, we just launched a private community just for you called Rev Room. We know it gets lonely out there and we've built a tight-knit group of senior leaders collaborating on the future of B2B go-to-market. Looking forward to seeing you all there.