Mona Akmal shares how Falkon AI flew up to speed to #getnoticed in a short amount of time

Hello and welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Today we are going all the way to Seattle. We're going to Mona Akmal, who is an entrepreneur. She's the CEO and founder of a company called Falcon AI. She's raised over $20 million for her business. I'm going to talk to her about how she's managed to go from being a Microsoft project manager to being an entrepreneur with some amazing founders. Mona, welcome.

Thank you.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you so much, Jim. It's great to be here.

Well, it's wonderful because you have a wonderful story. You have come from Pakistan to America, so you have the immigrant story, you have the technology, you know, project manager story within a big company, and now you run your own AI business. So tell us about Falcon AI and what problem it solves first. Then we're going to talk about how you managed to build this from nothing in a very short amount of time by getting noticed.

Yeah, absolutely. So Falcon.ai is tapping into this very unnoticed market. Software companies have been selling software in a very traditional way where marketing is responsible for brands and lead generation, sales is responsible for selling, customer success is responsible for making customers successful. And that model just stopped working. Modern selling does not work that way. Increasingly, we are giving away our products and services for free. So, all of our revenue is a function of expansion and not so much landing a big account that's worth $1 million. We're transitioning from human-led revenue generation to insight-led revenue generation, and it requires marketing, sales, customer success to all come together. And Falcon is a go-to-market intelligence platform that combines the data that these teams use, unifies it, and gives them all insights so that they can be the powerhouse revenue-generating engine for their companies.

Wow, Mona, I love that articulation of how industry has changed, as you say, because there are so many touch points now between the customer and the company on its customer journey before, during, and after the sale. And as you say, for big companies that are working in silos. So you've had this idea to, if you like, move from human-centered to data centers. You've had to cross a chasm though, because you are moving a market as well, aren't you? Can you help us to understand how have you been explaining the proposition of Falcon AI to your customers?

Absolutely. And I think that, you know, any category-defining product, the biggest obstacle it must overcome is status quo. It's not another competitor. And I think of it as you are trying to sell to a lion that has had a thorn stuck in its paw for 10 years that it can actually walk on all 4 paws, and it's forgotten that it can. And so, it's about helping people understand the pain that they have lived with for a very long time. When the underlying market dynamic isn't shifting, that change is impossible. It's only when the market dynamic shifts, right? So, we are seeing the rise of product-led growth. We are seeing the rise of usage-based pricing, entirely new business models that are already creating pressure on chief revenue officers and sales leaders. They are being asked to operate at a scale that they've never done before with a workforce that is very small and lean. We believe that the market correction that's happening right now with tech companies is also really helping our case. So how we've managed to convince or create a market for us is one, Classic crossing the chasm, bet on the early adopters. We don't need every customer out there to be a strategic visionary, but we need our first 20 customers to be people who already see where the puck is going. And identifying what watering holes are these strategic modern revenue leaders at, and they are in micro-communities. And then leading with thought leadership and delivering value through content. Half of my team is former Dropbox people, and Dropbox was the canonical product-led growth company. And so, being able to share our experiences of having built these modern systems before, and the benefits that they accrue, and how different the world can be if we change our mindset, has been the story that we've been telling.

Well, okay, there's masses in there, Mona. I think I'd love to just talk first of all about this concept of the micro-communities and finding where your customers are. How did you identify who those people are going to be and where did you find them and what was the nature of the engagement? Because people don't wanna be trolled, right? I mean, that can seem slightly nerve-wracking and irksome. So how did you go about that?

Absolutely. So first and foremost, you know, because we are selling to sales leaders and revenue leaders, LinkedIn is a very active platform place for them. Many of them have personal brands around it. So it starts with just following them and then starting a conversation, probably simply through a comment or sharing an opinion on something that they've posted, and then turning that into a direct conversation on LinkedIn, and then inviting them to join our micro-community of thought partners and leaders that we are excited to converse with. And similarly asking them what are communities that they are in that they're getting a lot of value out of where they are finding other people like themselves? So it's really not one tactic. It's more about seeking those humans out online, predominantly on LinkedIn in our case, building relationships with them, and then learning through them where other people like them are.

Wow. And can you get enough scale? Because you mentioned you've got a small team, and we'll talk more about the business in just a moment, but Isn't that one of the challenges that people have got is, you know, LinkedIn is 80 or 90 million people on there. And if you're trying to build key accounts, you know, how do you get the time, if you like, to reach out personally to that many people?

Yes. So I think first of all, I've had to change my own workday to create time for this because these are amplifiers, right? For instance, Sid Kumar is the SVP of Revenue Operations at HubSpot. I found him on LinkedIn and really enjoyed his point of view on strategic revenue operations, reached out to him personally and started a discussion. He then became an advisor and he is an amplifier because he has access to 100 other strategic revenue operations leaders. So I don't have to reach out to 101. I only reach out to one. You activate one node in the network and then you get access to 100 other nodes. So it amplifies pretty quickly.

Okay, Mona, that's great. And that's sort of the whole cascade theory as well, isn't it? About finding people in the node and once they're convinced of what you are doing, they'll give you access to their networks. That though doesn't build a brand, does it? For Come Like Falcon, how are you going about building a brand? Because these direct interchanges are great. But at some stage, you know, you want to start to get people coming to you as well as you going to them, don't you, to attain scale?

Yes, absolutely. So I don't think there's any one technique for building a brand. I think it's a few things. First is we actually work with a phenomenal PR agency that is helping me get out there and have conversations like this conversation to talk about issues that are pertinent to Falcon and Falcon's customers and prospective customers. Second is we have a social influencer program where we have 100 social influencers who are working with us, and each one of them has 10,000 to 100,000 followers that are our target market. And so when they post things related to the topics we care about, we now all of a sudden have access to a million of the most relevant people, and it's a multi-pronged strategy, right? So it's not just one It's literally 100 micro-influencers and their networks. And then the third is we engage in all the relevant channels around, you know, boosting our paid social on LinkedIn. We are really focusing on developing high-value content that is bite-sized, shareable. We're also exploring TikTok, and because TikTok is relatively new, so we are exploring being a thought leader in terms of content on TikTok for the topics, again, that are pertinent to Falcon. So that's essentially our current strategy for building our brand and getting our name out there.

Mona, that's in the same way that you're approaching multi, you know, silos from a revenue point of view. It's fascinating. You're actually creating integration between the silos of communication and content as well, aren't you? So you've figured that out really nicely.

Thank you. That's a good connection.

Yeah. Well, look, it's genius. Now you've also managed to raise a lot of money, shifting focus slightly, you've managed to raise $20 million, a 4 and then a 16 round. For a relatively young company, that's a phenomenal achievement. I'd love to just switch tacks slightly and talk about investor relations and how you got noticed because, you know, as you mentioned, you know, you're a first-time founder, you're originally from Pakistan, you know, working for big companies, but not with a track record as an entrepreneur. I'd like to just let us know how you've overcome that hurdle or hurdles, I should say. There's more than one hurdle in there.

Yes, absolutely. So I think that when I left Microsoft about 10 years ago, I knew I wanted to start my own company, but I also knew all the challenges and obstacles that would be in the way. And the biggest obstacle honestly was I didn't know anyone in the startup world. Being completely unknown, especially early stage investing, is about feeling confident about the founder and feeling confident about the market. Nobody cares what your actual idea is. They're betting on you, right?

Yeah.

So while people think my journey with Falcon started in 2020, actually my journey with Falcon started in 2012. I decided to become a known entity. And so I went, put myself through CEO school, which to me was, I worked for 3 very different CEOs building 3 very different companies, became deeply entrenched in the startup community, met a lot of investors through those 3 jobs that I did. Ended up being in board meetings where I became a known quantity. So even though I was not known as an entrepreneur, I was known as the second in command. And that's how I went from some random Microsoft employee to a known quantity in the startup world. And then there is still the journey of becoming finally an entrepreneur. And I spent a lot of time just building relationships with investors, reading their thesis, understanding what their unit economics are like. I don't look like a high-tech founder. I am a small brown woman, not from the US, right? So I'm neither a tall Asian man, nor am I a skinny white man. And so I don't fit the pattern.

You're not in the stereotype, as you say, not in the stereotype there.

Absolutely. And so it was very important for me to be 10 times better than the average founder out there. to reduce the anxiety and the fear that is associated with betting on people that don't look like your stereotype of success. And I was just willing to do the work.

You know, I think that's really inspirational, as you say, to go and take on the underdog mentality and be— but also to be an understudy. I mean, I think, and 3 shows a great deal of dedication and persistence as well to do that. But you've talked about moving the company from being, you know, human-centered to data-centered, or other companies moving and Falcon being able to do that. Once you've moved beyond these early adopters, Mona, who are reaching out as you are to change the business, where do you see Falcon playing and how do you see it sort of building a brand so that a bit like salesforce.com all those years ago, a sales platform as a SaaS was something no one even thought about, right? But obviously now today it's a well-known brand, or even in the home. So how do you move into the late-stage adopters and the mass market?

Yep. So I would say we're still very early on our journey there, right? So we have revenue, we have 17 phenomenal customers, excellent brands like Redis Labs, Zendesk, and so on. But that is still early days. Going from 20 to 100 customers and 100 to 1,000 customers is an entirely different ballgame. And so Personally, what I am doing is instead of leading through direct ownership, I am now leading through hiring leaders. So we just hired our CMO because look, as a founder in the first innings, your job is just to barely get to a point where you can hire the experts to do their job, right? Because I'm not a marketer. I'm also not a salesperson. And so I think it's really predominantly betting on leaders that have done this before. that have built category-defining companies before and relying on their excellence and leading them by providing a clear vision and by providing enough capital and runway that they can be effective in their jobs. So, I know it's a bit of a cop-out answer, but that is sort of where we currently are.

No, Mona, it's not a cop-out at all because what you're really articulating is this transition, isn't it, as a company, you know, goes from 15 to 25 people, depending on the nature of the industry, it changes from a structural point of view, doesn't it? You know, you have people that need to manage processes internally, and as a founder, you have to do your own work in a different way and hand off the vision to the next cadre of leaders. So it's not a cop-out, it just shows you're maturing into the next level of leader, you know, which doesn't surprise me at all. In terms of the communication with the new people that you're bringing on. I'd love to hear how you're sharing the vision, because communication internally is not going to be sustainable in terms of generating leads if the organization doesn't keep pace with what you're creating in terms of market demand. So can you just share how you sort of getting the team along and engaged with you? Any particular tools or practices you're using?

Yes, this is actually a place where I feel very blessed. You know, I started a company when I was 40. I'd already spent 20 years in the industry. I've run 500-person teams before. So, you know, I've done this part before, actually. So how we run, how we are transitioning into leading through people as opposed to direct ownership is by using OKRs, Objectives and Key Results. I am a huge believer in OKRs. So quarterly, we set objectives for the company. It is my job to set those objectives, no more than 3. And then, every leader at the company is responsible for defining key results. And every key result has to be quantifiable and measurable so that we're not debating what the definition of success looks like. And then, we track our key results, progress towards key results, every 2 weeks at the company level. So that everyone has clarity on whether we are making progress or not. And if we're not making progress, what are we going to do differently in the following 2 weeks so that we are in a different, better position when we do our check-in again? That's the way.

Okay, so that's wonderful. That's very practical. From a platform perspective, from a technology, from a communications and the sharing perspective, are you using a platform like Monday, for example, or using Slack, HubSpot, or does HubSpot do that internal communications for you as well?

So, I tend to be a very tool-light person, and I'll tell you why. Because, you know, for instance, our marketing team right now uses Notion. Our engineering team uses Trello. Our customer success team uses spreadsheets. And I want people to pick tools that make them comfortable. But when it is about company-level objectives and key results, we use the simplest common tool that everyone knows how to use, which is a Google spreadsheet. And my team always gives me grief about that, but I'm sticking with it for now.

Is there some irony then, Mona, that Falcon is integrating through AI multiple, you know, document and datasets? There's some irony that is, but there is, as you say—

We actually use Falcon for our go-to-market teams. But their work processes are still very much in their productivity tools of choice, like Notion and Trello and so on.

Yeah. So I think you're identifying how different teams have different processes and different communications, but unifying it, the simplicity is really the key, isn't it, Mona? If there's one piece of advice from a communications point of view, because you've obviously got a wealth of experience at lots of levels, but on the sort of conversation line of getting noticed, would there be one piece of advice you've given to an entrepreneur that's sort of maybe 5, 6 years, you know, down the line from you?

Yeah, absolutely. I think a few very important things come together. First, as an early-stage entrepreneur, there is no difference between your brand and your company's brand. People are— for the first 5 years of your company's life, they're buying you as much as they're buying your software. And so, as a founder, understanding what are the unique values and elements of your personality that come through into your personal brand and your company's brand, really understanding what those are and then doubling down on them. They can't be more than 3 because otherwise you get a pretty confused brand. So I think, and then consistently communicating to those 3 key messages that are uniquely suited for, I think, is the key. And then last thing I would say is think very much about where you need to be communicating. Who are you communicating with? Because often we focus on what we are saying and less about are we saying it in the right platform. So for us, for instance, LinkedIn is the best platform because everyone we're trying to speak to is there and is very active there. Right? So figure out what your watering hole is.

Mona, that's wonderful. And we've got sort of a bark of agreement there from your dogs. So thank you. They're obviously in alignment with you as well. Mona Akmal, joining me all the way from Seattle, Washington, CEO of Falcon AI. Thank you so much for joining me and sharing your wisdom. And of course, as always, I will put my guest's details in the show notes. So Mona Akmal, thank you so much for joining me on the Unnoticed Entrepreneur Show today.

Thank you so much, Jim. This was fantastic. So much fun.

A lot of fun. Thank you. And you've been listening to Mona Akmal, who has a great success story and some really good practical wisdom for all of us that are growing a business. And as always, I'll put her details in the show notes. If you've enjoyed this, do share it with a fellow entrepreneur. And if you've got the time to please review it, that really helps as well. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur with me, Jim James.