Lessons Learned from Salesforce: Top 4 Mistakes Founders Make: A conversation with MaestroQA

Salesforce, of course. And we're going to talk today about some of the lessons learned around the top 4 mistakes founders make. And we're going to have a fantastic time. We're here with Vasu Pratapati, who's the CEO and founder of one of our good friends, Maestro QA. What's going on, Vasu? Uh-oh, I think you might be on mute, my friend.

Good catch, first blip. Thank you for having me, Jonathan, or co-hosting this with me. Thank you for Saastr for having me. And yeah, really looking forward to this conversation. As Jonathan mentioned, CEO and co-founder of Maestro QA, and we'll tell you a little bit more about what we do in a couple slides.

Awesome, man. This is an exciting conversation. Founders put so much investment, time, energy, and their life, their life into these brands that they're building. We want to give you as much information as we can about some of the things that we've seen out in the marketplace good stuff, the bad stuff, things we've, we've seen people get right, things we've not seen, not seen them do over and over again wrong. We boiled it down to 4 basic topics. If we could go and hop in into it, those topics are, okay, 1, choosing the right team. It sounds like it's like, of course, but let's think about that, you know, think about that, that team first. Focusing on selling, not just the building. And designing a market-led product that's built for the community that you wish to serve. And then lastly, prioritizing and understanding the difference between a vendor and a partner. Let's get started. This is gonna be a fun conversation, huh, Vasu? Yes, sir. All right. Okay, so from Salesforce's point of view, right, a lot of folks out there are deciding to go with Salesforce Why? Okay, one is this world we are experiencing a labor, labor is a big topic. 4.2 million new jobs are gonna be created on the Salesforce economy in the next few years by 2024. Along with that $1.2 trillion worth of new business opportunity. And if you're building an organization that you wish to exit one day, over $100 billion in those IPO acquisitions valued since 2016. And these partners, those that you see on the left and many that you, that you probably don't see, are punching well above their weight class, representing only 7% of the global SaaS businesses, but garnering almost 20% of funding opportunities. There's a lot there, there with Salesforce. Explore it, do some due diligence for yourself when you're thinking about how to expand the access that you have to your clients and the markets that you wish to wish to find, think about Salesforce. We're gonna talk a little bit more about that later. So my name is Jonathan, as I said. I lead at Salesforce a program called the Business Builders. And what is a Business Builder? Salesforce is always looking to build the future that we wish to see. And so by that, we wanna go and find the founders that have these amazing new ideas that are going to augment our platform and help accelerate the growth of our existing customers. And so what do we do? What are we looking for when we find what we call a business builder, which is a founder of one of these type of organizations? So around the globe last year, we chose around 20 folks, 20 organizations rather, to become a part of this program. It was an amazing journey. How do we choose them? One, they were proven or promising entrepreneurs with a very strong industry point of view. They knew their business really well. And that's one of the most common traits. We want folks that are doing the business, that are in the business, and they can bring a strong point of view to the technology that they're developing. They also had a great team around them. You cannot build a company alone. "It will not work." So they already kind of were working and thinking around a team. And so that's one of the big things for us. Also, one of the first questions I ask every one of the folks that came into our program is, "What problem are you solving and who you're solving it for?" The who you're solving it for really matters because as we're thinking about how Salesforce can help you, let's understand where we're selling, where we're not, and where the market is going. And so if you're aligned to that, we can really see a lot of parallels there, and that's something that we'd be really interested in. Usually speaking, we're going to be talking to folks that are B2B or B2B2C with their, with their, with their target markets. They're folks that are going after businesses to sell to. We are an organization that feels that our values lead to value, and our values are trust, customer success, innovation, equality, and sustainability. And we look for partnerships that align, or partners and founders that align with those types of values. Some experience with the Salesforce platform, education of the network and the ecosystem is of high interest to us. And usually you're in earlier stage, you're not quite a grizzled unicorn at this point. Our job is to figure out how to take you from that Series A, Series B, all the way up to a unicorn status or value organization. That's the goal of the Business Builder Program. I think let's go to the next, let's go, who is Maestro? Basu, tell us a little bit about what you're doing.

Yeah, no, thank you for that introduction and excited to be working with y'all in the Salesforce ecosystem. Y'all have made such an amazing impact on the world through the economy you've created. Maestro QA, we help customer service teams have better conversations with their customers by providing analytics and insights into the quality of those conversations and then letting our customer service managers action on those insights through coaching their reps. You can almost think of it like a gong for customer support. A 1-minute intro about us. We have over 300 customers. We launched our Salesforce partnership last year and are excited to be aligned with them on those values and being part of that growth story that Jonathan was alluding to. And yeah, we're a little under 100 employees. We're remote first, values first, and we're actively hiring. So if you like what you hear, you like my personality enough to at least reach out from this conversation, please do. We got 3 core values that we revolve the company around. One is always be evolving, both as a company and our expectation of people. We empower people for speed, but ask them— and ask them to bias for action. So we really believe putting decision-making at the edges is the most exciting place for individuals so they can own their decisions and actions with an aligned vision. And then lastly, one of our more unique things, we really believe in this idea of structured thinking paired with Socratic debate. How do we force people or ask people to think through frameworks. And instead of debating via opinions, debate through asking each other questions and curiosity. And so if those types of ways of interacting with each other and actioning yourself resonates with you, reach out.

Thank you, dude. I love the idea of Socratic debate. That is awesome. Um, so today, mistake number 1, and then that's— I think you guys got this one right. Definitely got this one right. But I think that what I've seen over the past couple years as we've been doing this is folks not choosing the right team. And the impact of that is significant and it vibrates for quite some time. So let's get into some of the learnings there. One of the biggest things about the right team, what does right mean though? That's the question, right? What does right mean? I mean, we have to think about our objectives, the goals that we're trying to achieve, and then really the characteristics and traits needed to build that quote unquote right team. I guess, and you talked about this upfront and early, just like Salesforce does, culture. You know, the folks, they can be an amazing resource, but if they don't fit your culture, it doesn't work for you. And then also in this case, it's not about the speed by which you pull together people, right? Because those first two things are really important, So take your time in that process when you're evaluating members of that initial founding team. It's really important for us to choose that right team. And then this will all determine, you know, these learnings really is like, how fun is this journey gonna be? Is this gonna be a painful exercise or is this gonna be kind of fun? But the mistake is not prioritizing the development of a comprehensive team lack of coverage because you didn't kind of identify all the, all the, all the places that you wanted to, to cover based on your original vision. You can't execute it because you don't have the coverage or you're trying to do double duty as the founder. And, you know, it goes downhill from there. What are your thoughts on this?

Yeah, I mean, I think building the right team, as people know, is incredibly important. And maybe some of the insights I'll share— this is one that we've made so many mistakes along our journey, the type that you always want You almost kick yourself in the foot every day and then you gotta realize it's all part of the journey. But this is one, as you mentioned, I feel most proud of. And, you know, maybe we got lucky, maybe it was wisdom when we started, who knows what was the driver of it. But what I think are a couple traps people fall into is you wanna start a company and you're like, let me get the first co-founder and let me find the right co-founder in the first 5 minutes or first 5 interviews or 10 interviews. And I'm so fortunate, my co-founder Harrison Hunter, he's like a human unicorn. But what made it work up to this point, and we've been 10 years into it together, is we had a strong sense of shared values and alignment. And we were in it, you know, we were hard, we're committed, and we found a founding team that was equally committed. Because when you're starting something and it's so fragile and things can break if just one person leaves, there's so many odds stacked against you. The last thing you need to do is wake up and wonder if your co-founder is gonna be fully in it. And, or just gonna walk up and leave in that day. And so if you can just have incredible trust in your team, then you can actually focus on solving the logical problems and you don't need to worry about what happens as you scale, a lot more people challenges. And so you just don't need those people challenges as a distraction early on. And so that is the, my number one thing that we really lucked out in getting right and would highly recommend is that long-term thinking. Wait a year if it takes to find that right founding team, because you should be planning this journey 10, 15, 20 years out. It's not a 3-year journey.

There you go, man. That's awesome. Thank you so much.

Perfect.

Let's go to the next one. All right, thinking if you build it, they will come. Ooh, man, that's a big one, dude. That's a big one. So many founders with so many really cool ideas, okay? I probably, oh man, how many, how many, discovery sessions were we in last year where we were really excited about these really amazing ideas that are really going to— that really could impact a community or our country or the world. But you got to do some other work besides that. Let's get into it.

100%. Okay.

What do you think about this, Leslie?

Yeah, no, I think this is a mistake that we made really big our first time over and we made it a little bit. We've corrected it, fortunately, a little bit faster with than the Salesforce partnership. But the first, uh, first time we built it, we were a total technology-first, not customer-centric-first company. The origination story of Maestro QA, which was known as Adtrib originally, was based on a research paper of a professor of mine at Penn. And it was about algorithms on how to take website data to predict certain actions. And just hearing me describe it, there's no sense of even who's the customer in that idea. And The biggest thing is we, we pounded the pavement for 3 years building technology and fighting uphill battles, building a total nice-to-have. And we were so stoked by the technology we built and we were so ingrained with the cool machine learning technology that we just were blinded by how little true customer demand there was. And so, you know, the result is even more severe, low pipeline generation, low revenue, like just like low morale when you really just only focus on technology and not the customers. And so. That's one area of where we really made that mistake, uh, originally. And the second time we applied it is within the Salesforce ecosystem. We built a Salesforce app and we just expected customers to come to us. Uh, we thought if we were launching the app store, um, that would solve it. But what we realized was how important, um, there's many apps in the Salesforce ecosystem. Jonathan alluded to how big the economy of Salesforce is and you need to proactively invest in it through go-to-market relationships, not just through technology. And so that second time we made that mistake, we corrected a lot faster. And the big learning was how do we build a stronger, holistic, and proactive go-to-market partnership with Salesforce?

Absolutely. So I couldn't have said it better myself. Like so many folks— and now don't get us wrong, the AppExchange is a great vehicle to getting in front of some of your best customers. And it will get you in the room, but you must make some phone calls. You must work a strategy. You must have a plan around how you're going to get visibility to your top targets. Thank you, Vasu. That's awesome. That's awesome. Designing tech first, not market first. Hmm, okay. I like this idea. I like this a lot. Well, let's, let's get into this one. Okay.

I mean, these things, there's almost a pattern. You can see that every mistake we made in our early first on journey as a company before making changes and pivoting, we almost made many versions when we first started the Salesforce partnership. And so this example is like, we've had 300 customers or 200 customers before we really engaged in this partnership. And we thought it was the same playbook. Like, hey, we knew how to speak about our product and how we were going to sell it. Uh, and that's the motion we applied when we started partnering with Salesforce, still about our coaching product and our analytics product. And when we then go— when— and then when we went to go talk to the solutions consulting teams, sales teams, different folks, the product folks at Salesforce, we just saw that we didn't have the same product-market fit we had with our market.

Didn't—

wasn't— it wasn't resonating at the same level of frequency with our, with our Salesforce partners, the individuals on, on this, on the ground at Salesforce. And what we learned and have corrected, and we've seen great dividends, is wait, we have a second customer. Our first customer was these customer service teams, but we need to understand Salesforce as a customer. What's the value prop that they're going out, uh, with? What's their market messaging? And it was an incredible learning of how to almost imagine we have a second customer and treat them with the same customer success mindset we treat our original customers with. And, uh, that goes from messaging to product strategy and all the way down. Does that resonate as a mistake from your experience, Jonathan?

We've seen so much of that. I was talking to one of our product development outsourcers, um, and, and he gave me a great thought. And I, and I, and I say this all the time, and I give him, I give him a lot of credit for this, but he says, um, when I go and interview a first-time, um, founder, they talk all about the product Okay, and then when I'm, when I'm talking to— I know that I'm talking to an experienced founder when he's talking about how he's going to sell this product, right? And so that, and that, that matters a lot because if you're thinking about what you're developing, the, the amount of cost that's built into the development process, uh, garner— getting that back is great. I say when you're developing these, um, these, uh, these MVPs What functionality goes in there? That's what your market wants. That's the functionality that you're building in and not so much all the other things, the bells and whistles, the nice-to-haves. But what does your market need? What is going to get somebody to make the phone call to say, yes, that's addressing the problem that we're having and that addresses it now. And that is where you have to be. All the other things you're gonna try to forced early on. Uh, it'll be great to have as accelerators later, but, uh, that getting that, getting that market understanding and leaning into your product is so important. That's a great one. This is a great one.

And if I, if I can maybe add a quick anecdote to that previous point, um, yeah, is the— a great example, and I won't name the actual person that we were co-selling with, but, you know, we were having a co-selling conversation just this morning actually, and lightbulb moment was when we go sell into a customer and try and win a deal, we have a certain competitive set. We have a certain value proposition. And if Salesforce is our customer, they have a different competitive set and they have a different way of trying to position themselves in the market as the best solution. And it's incumbent on us to adapt, to understand how they're trying to differentiate and fit into that story. And so it's just a totally different market dynamic than the one we typically operate in. And so that's like understanding who your customer is. What their differentiation strategy, who their competitive set is. That's what having the market in mind is first and then working backwards to your, to your solution.

Absolutely. Absolutely. What problem are you solving and who are you solving it for? Now, I see this one in so many different ways, shapes and forms. I see the difference between a vendor and a partner, right? I see the difference in folks that kind of think about their partnerships after the core team have made all their decisions. I've seen folks that never consider what their partners are, how to work with their partners when making those core decisions. I can't wait to get into talking about this one because I see, I see it reoccurring in so many different organizations, so many different shapes and forms.

Yeah, I mean, this is another phenomenal learning that I'm excited. I'm on the other side of the learning. I still got to go prove it out and do a lot better, act on the learning, but You know, one of the best— a little side tour and then we'll really get into the meat of this slide— is there's, you know, you often have choices of breadth versus depth. And what I love about being in SaaS and being in B2B and being in B2B enterprise particularly is there's such an important relationship part of the business. It's such an important relationship part of the game. And, you know, the more SMB and then all the way to consumer, you have such a high volume, it's hard to have deep relationships with people. And so Again, it's easy to imagine, okay, you wanna, you know, customer success is talked about and we understand the concept and we know how important it is to have relationships with our customers. And once you flip the switch to think your partners are now your customers, you have to figure out, prioritize them and figure out who you can go really deep with because you can't go deep with everyone. And so what does depth look like from a partnership standpoint? Our first initial stab at partnerships was, okay, there's a partnership function. And that function is responsible for, uh, is responsible for building out partnerships and driving whatever the KPI is with that partner.

Got it.

That makes sense. But what you start to see is like all these, you know, you get some pipeline out of it, you get some referral sales, you get some co-hosted events, you get something out of it. But what you start to see when someone particularly starts kicking your butt and you're like, whoa, like they're doing it way better. What's the difference? And, you know, you have to take that, you know, uh, respect it and then figure out how to get better and compete again. And what you see the best do is they understand how strategically, how strategically important a partnership can be. And they understand that it's a whole company strategy. It's maybe analogous if there's any marketers listening to this, we talk about how ABM isn't a marketing thing, but it's a whole company thing. You run the whole company around account-based marketing. And I think partnerships are the same way that you can have, you need a partnership person to be the quarterback of the relationship. But for me as the founder and CEO, need to make sure the whole go-to-market leadership is aligned around how we make sure our product strategy aligns with our partners' roadmap strategy and building deeper and deeper integrations. How do we make our VP of sales face off with our partners' VP of sales and collaborate and build those relationships? How do we make sure that when we run a QBR as a success team, we can bring in a partner into there and build that relationship? And then marketing is one of those more— you can kind of get a sense of that more like through shared field marketing events and shared webinars. But to do it really right, you have to go all in on the partnership. And there's no way you can do that with more than a couple. So you have to really be strategic around who is that long-term relationship you want to go all in with. And we're at the early phases again. We haven't totally conquered this learning, but we're already seeing the dividends of it. And our partner, the level of excitement engagement we're getting with our partner has significantly improved as a result of this.

Yeah, and one of the big things about partners is what are they pouring back into your organization? You know, it's one thing like that's how I define the difference between a vendor and a partner. A vendor is providing a service and you are exchanging. A partner is we're exchanging, we're doing all the business that we must do, but we're also investing in each other. That's a partnership. And a partnership is not a heavy thing. It is it is something that both folks come to for a win-win. Like, I'm investing time, you're investing time, we both know what we're going to get out of this at the end, and we're okay with that. And when we aren't okay, we're going to talk about it and get to okay. So that's— this is one of the— my, my, my key, outside of the number one, this is probably— if you're into the partnership world, which you probably will, you cannot do this alone, uh, this is one of the biggest things that we see is understanding your relationships with the folks around you. All right, cool. Anything else on this one? We had to recap: choosing the right team, focus on selling, not just building, designing a market-led product, and prioritizing those key partnerships. Really impactful, uh, stuff. I hope this helps a couple folks. I think we have a couple questions. Um, how do we do this? Let's see, Q&A. All right, let's see. All right, and let's see, there's a couple questions here. Let me look at them. Well, okay, so someone, someone asked a question: In what ways is it possible to over-consider the market rather than the techno— uh, the technology itself in building a product? What tips do you have for striking the perfect balance? That kind of, that kind of reminds me of what Henry Ford said. He said, if I asked my customer what they'd want, they'd ask for what, like faster horses or something like that? So, so sometimes as visionaries, we have to think about the future and what will come. What are your thoughts there, Vasu?

I think that's spot on. I mean, you want to use it as a data point about what's out there in the market, but if you don't want to just copy what's out there, so when you're over-considering it is when you, uh, basically just build what's already out there versus applying your vision to it. And that's the hard part, that artistic part of where you see the world going and pairing that with where you see the market is today.

Awesome. Um, how much should I worry if Salesforce seems very aligned to a competitor? Will that make it hard, uh, make it too hard for me to break into the ecosystem? Well, I think that, um, we believe in competition. Uh, we like competition. Uh, we like the best to win. Um, we also do support our partners. And so if we have a partner that is hyper successful, you will see us, uh, leaning into that because they obviously have some sort of technology that's becoming the dominant design in that space. But there's always a niche that you can find. There's always a new need that organizations haven't yet discovered. So if you're coming in to do the same thing that's already there, that might be tough. If you're trying to— if you have a new spin on a problem that we used to solve this way, but now we can solve it that way, that's what— that's the point of view that we'd like to see. Why is your way of solving it better than the incumbent? And that's your— that's where you should go. That's, that's how I would answer that question. Uh, does this make sense? We have about 4 minutes left. Um, could I, could I read one that has my name? Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, go ahead.

So it goes, Vasu, with hindsight, would it have made sense to invest in Salesforce even early as a partner given how many Salesforce customers you had? The good question. I would say the short answer is yes. Maybe the more nuanced answer is I think The learning in hindsight is how much depth there is to really invest. So yeah, one could argue in a binary sense, we did invest in it, right? Like we did something there. Uh, we had an integration, but when over time, and you know, time you learn these things, but ideally you learn it earlier. Um, we would have realized how much opportunity there was to invest, how much more we could have done with product, how much more we could have aligned with sales, all those things about really going all in. And so I think, uh, it's that understanding of how big the opportunity is that would have, uh, if I understood it better earlier, would have catalyzed action. So I think that's what people should evaluate, not a binary yes or no, but really start to think about how creatively deep you could go in there. And that oftentimes that depth will inspire, um, more.

Indeed. Um, when does it make sense for, uh, to outsource for first Salesforce, your first Salesforce integration? Like, so I— some folks have an expansive bench of Salesforce professionals, uh, and that's fantastic. I would say what the— what a, what a PDO or a, um, a product development outsourcer does for you though is it helps you through that security review. You, you may not— you may be able to build, configure an app on the front end, but are you developing it for for the appropriate security standards that Salesforce lives up to. Trust is our number one value, and inside of trust is our security. We do not compromise there. And so that's where you'll get hung up the most. Also, if this is your first one, like, look into it. Look into the PDOs. What would that— what would that cost you? What— how complicated is it? You might learn something in that exploration. Exploration of the discovery model that would change the way you develop the application. So the— I, I like PDOs because that we work with them quite a bit. They know how to work with Salesforce, and, and as, as a first-time integrator, it becomes a little bit more, uh, complicated for you. A couple questions about how to get in contact with me. I think Bernadine has dropped the, uh, Business Builder email address in there. That's isvbusinessbuilders@salesforce.com. Also my LinkedIn. I'm Jonathan Weston on LinkedIn. I'm highly available. Hit me up. I will respond. It's one of my core values. So that is, that is, that is where you can find me. Vasu, we have about a minute left. Any closing thoughts, my friend?

I would love to answer one last question and then we can call it a wrap. If OAuth into Salesforce is good enough, when should I go all in on AppExchange? Example, Gong just announced it's on the AppExchange. We went through this transition. We started with an OAuth integration and then we went all in. It's related to my previous point. It's when you're ready to go all in on not just the technology side, but you're ready to go all in on the go-to-market side is when we— is how we looked at it. So hopefully that's helpful for this audience. Thank you everyone for the time.

All right. Well, thank you everybody. It's businessbuilders@salesforce.com. Businessbuilders@salesforce.com. I'm Jonathan Weston. It's been an honor today. I'm so happy to have this conversation. And go out there and please everyone, build the future that we wish to see. Talk soon. Peace.