Building Belonging, Hiring Tech Talent, & Community-Based Organic Sales, with Yassamine Ebadat

Yasmin, welcome to the show.

Thank you. I'm so happy to be here.

I'm excited for you to be here. There's lots to talk about with your company, how it's evolved, where it's gone. For people who aren't familiar with Vital, what are you doing today with the company?

Absolutely. So Vital is focused on transforming how people build culture together while growing individually. So the platform is deploying pulse surveys and using the data that it's collecting to recommend behavioral nudges that are really coaching employees based on their unique culture needs and where they are at any given moment. So it's designed to make culture work feel really light and approachable, and to really help people, you know, explore and try new positive behaviors without it feeling really heavy or even overly performative, like a lot of culture work can feel.

There's something, obviously, at this time with everything going remote for so many people, that this is even more so needed. I know you worked at a lot of other companies previously, lots of experience heading into Vital. Why for you launch a company, go the startup route? Like just take me through that evolution.

Yeah, definitely. So I would, I know that a lot of people who are in this position say that they have always been really, really entrepreneurial. That is not me. I kind of wanna normalize that. I remember I was a Girl Scout when I was 10 and I was so bad at selling that I would take my 8-year-old sister with me door to door and have her go up to the door and I would stand at the end of the driveway just waiting for her to like close the deal and then come back. and tell me that we got it. So it's definitely been a journey for me.

Love it.

The reason that we founded Vital was because I was working in the human capital consulting space with my co-founder, George Ho, at a boutique human capital consulting firm that he started called Greater Human Capital. And we really were consulting clients of all sizes across multiple industries, multiple sectors. And this is late summer 2020. So, you know, a lot of organizations thought we were gonna return to work after Labor Day. It became immediately kind of obvious at the end of the summer that we were going to have to sustain remote work, that this is going to be something a little bit more long-term than all of us were anticipating. And on top of that, we had had this really kind of painful summer, I think collectively. You know, we were faced with a lot of police brutality and a lot of racial injustice. And so employees everywhere were kind of looking to their employers to be reacting accordingly to both of these things. And so we were receiving a lot of requests from clients for employee engagement initiatives, DEI initiatives that were both impactful and then sustainable, that they could really kind of, you know, repeat and scale at their organizations. And we as consultants were going through kind of this heavy journey with our, with our clients. We were creating bespoke initiatives. We were, you know, understanding their challenges and their needs and their pain points. We were having stakeholder interviews, program design, and change management, meeting with managers, meeting with employees. And at a certain point of doing this across, you know, 15 clients, we kind of looked to the market to see what tools were out there that could really help us. And honestly, we couldn't really find anything that was this kind of holistic culture builder or program builder. And I think on top of it, belonging really emerged as this kind of foundational element of culture, one that when you kind of strip back the layers of what people were kind of struggling with and what employees were struggling with, it kind of all boiled down to this lack of belonging, this lack of feeling accepted, for who they are, recognized by their companies for their unique value, and then connected to each other. So a light bulb moment kind of went off and we decided to kind of build our own tool that was centered around belonging, but really combined survey deployment, goal deployment, and then nudge deployment as well to really give people the resources that they need to really build culture together.

So at that time as well, then you said build your own tool. Did you know this was gonna be, let's go startup route, venture-backed, we're gonna do this whole thing? Or was it like, let's start with this cuz we need this and like, eh, we'll see what happens. Like where, just where were you at? I'm curious.

So no, I actually think we were like, how can we deliver this kind of consultant-ready resource to organizations everywhere? So scale was kind of always part of the equation from the beginning. Of course, we had, you know, our clients. I think as consultants, a lot of people kind of get into that field. I know that I did. I was an HR practitioner originally, but I went into consulting to be able to work with more organizations and really kind of deliver value across a portfolio rather than just at one company. And so with Vital, the intention was very much always the same. It was, how How can we kind of get this to organizations regardless of geography, regardless of budget, you know, regardless of the resources that they have in-house to really help everyone kind of, you know, be able to grow culture more effectively, to really be intentional about this process and to equip employees in the process to really share the responsibility. We were always kind of hoping to scale. We always knew that we would have to kind of go, you know, the fundraising route to really, you know, to build this the way that we really want to.

To that point with the product itself then, I know I looked online, you said lots of research behind it to go into how do you have the nudges, what does it look like? Take me through that side of things and figuring out what that was going to look like in terms of the product itself then.

Absolutely. So my co-founder George Ho, I mentioned, he is a professor of HR at Georgetown and USC. He comes from a long history of consulting and he really is, he's the chief product officer. He really has that eye for kind of what the best practices would be here in terms of the product. Again, it really came from this experience of not being able to find the right kind of product on the market. A lot of the products that are out there are either really, really good at listening to employees, they are survey tools, they can deploy a bunch of different surveys with templates, and maybe they can analyze the data that they receive. But when you want to build something, you know, on top of that data and really listen to kind of the needs that are identified in a survey, you might really be on your own there. And then there are other products that really they can deploy kind of more general nudges or actions to employees, but they might not be data connected. You know, they're not really meeting employees exactly where they are and really considering their preferences or likes or dislikes, what it is that they need. And so I think for us, we really kind of went through this journey of analyzing exactly what was out there, kind of what the competitive landscape looked like. And as consultants, I think the beauty really is that like we have been our customers and we had this really, really direct pipeline to our customers just kind of built in. We were able to go to our clients and say, look, this is what we're thinking. What do you think? Would this actually solve any of the challenges that you have? If you had a tool like this, would you even need us? Would you need consultants anymore? Or would you pay, you know, a couple of dollars per employee and really have this tool that can kind of set it and forget it and automate culture building and kind of, you know, give you that data that you need in terms of employee engagement and inclusion and diversity and performance and manager effectiveness, and just kind of have all of that live in one comprehensive platform. So it was this kind of multi-pronged exploration process of understanding what the market looked like, really going to customers and saying, look, this is what we have in mind based on our own expertise, based on our work with you. Would this solve your challenges? If not, how can we kind of augment? And we really were able to kind of build upon all of that feedback and really build something great, I think.

At what point were you able to then get paying customers, people to commit to it? Because I actually read— I'm reading The Mom Test now, if you've heard that book or not. It's about user interviews and like how to get actually good feedback and everything. And you mentioned having these conversations with your clients. I'm curious as to when it shifted then to like getting paying customers or clients, uh, with the software as well, you know, going to that point from idea to then you're talking to customers, you're like, okay, well then actually having this product slash, did you have commitments before you launched? Like, I'm curious on how that kind of played out as well.

Yes. So we are launching our beta in 2 weeks and we kind of have all of our beta customers lined up. There were, A number, frankly, most of our clients did commit to using this product, which was really a vote of confidence that we really wanted.

Awesome.

If most of our clients were like, we wouldn't pay for this, that would've been a big issue. So our clients definitely represented, you know, they were those initial kind of users and evangelists, and that was really exciting. Beyond that, honestly, at this stage, we really have been leveraging our networks and the networks of our kind of investors, advisors, really kind of anyone that's in the Vital community. But to be honest with you, like, we really are— we've been able to drum up a good amount of buzz. And I think it is because we're meeting the moment. This is something that, you know, organizations are struggling with. It's a struggle to retain employees. You know, the market is volatile. There's a lot of opportunity out there for employees. So I think organizations are really looking for comprehensive tools that can help them navigate these challenges they're experiencing. And there's something about this insights to action piece that people really are missing and are excited to try. And so it's been, sales is a whole process, but it's been really eye-opening and exciting to kind of get this vote of confidence from our clients and just people in our general networks really early.

On the fundraising side of things, take me through that experience for you, first time raising funds.

Yeah, I know. You know about my Girl Scouts past, so now I can tell you about what this has looked like. Yes. So we raised a pre-seed. We raised about $1.1 million from a variety of sources, mostly angels and kind of other investors in our network, and then friends and family as well. It has been really— on this end of things, I'm like, it was such a great opportunity. From the beginning, I was obviously scared. You know, there's an art to a pitch, right? You have to really kind of get, you know, the problem resonating with kind of larger audiences. You know, for us, the product and the field makes a lot of sense. We are HR consultants, but how do you kind of zoom this out and get everyone excited? How do you really articulate the opportunity in a way that resonates with investors specifically, which is a different audience than we're used to? So it really was a lot of research, a lot of prep work. Of course, we, I don't even wanna tell you how many iterations of the pitch deck we have. Something like—

oh, we can't just say that.

Yeah, right, exactly. I mean, they tell you not to spend too much time on it, but we definitely spent too much time on it. Um, and, you know, we— I mean, we must have pitched, I don't even know, 30 times, some to big groups, some to small groups. Um, we, you know, we tapped angel networks that were out there sending, you know, our pitch deck along so that they could share it with investors that they knew. So we really fired on all cylinders. Um, and, you know, I think it really was, for me as a founder and as a CEO, it really was my opportunity to kind of hone my kind of startup-oriented communication skills to really be able to speak in a way that has conviction, in a way that I'm able to get my passion across while still really demonstrating a financial opportunity here with this venture.

Were there any resources or people that were most helpful in going through that fundraising process? Because I talked to a lot of founders. Obviously we have a ton of resources at Vitalize Venture Capital and what I've seen, but I'm always curious for people who are in the thick of it and have just done it more recently. things that were helpful for you, people that helped for you going through that fundraising process, anything that comes to mind maybe?

Absolutely. So a couple of things, obviously, books and Google is like your best friend. There are so many pieces written on best practices for this that you can become an overnight expert, I think. Talking to other people who did it. One of our advisors, Aria Finger, she was the CEO of the largest youth nonprofit in the world, I think, dosomething.org. And she, over the course of her career, raised like $30 million. So was really able to kind of like leverage her experiences. I would say that our advisors just by and large have been incredible. Another one of our advisors, Akash Magoon, CTO of Naya, also has gone out and they've raised so much money. So, you know, across our kind of community of evangelizers, we really have amazing people in our corner who have done this, are able to tell us, you know, here's how to approach this. Gotten a lot of constructive feedback that maybe didn't feel good in the moment, but was able to kind of set me up for success. success later. I've met with a couple of VCs early just to kind of get the relationships going, and I've given them my pitch just to learn and have received a lot of really amazing feedback and questions there to know what to expect once we are kind of raising more in a, you know, once we're going out for institutional capital and kind of fielding investor questions. So it's been a huge learning process, but it really is this combination of research and kind of the people in our corner for sure.

One more thing I'm just curious about on that, on that note, cuz this comes up a lot with any founder. They're getting, they're getting input from like all these advisors, other founders, et cetera. How do you trust or know what to trust or how do you sift through that? You mentioned all the iterations of your pitch deck, but ultimately it's like you get to decide on what it is. It's your company. How have you gone about that?

Yeah, I think that I would say like a year ago I really couldn't trust my own gut. Like I didn't know what I was doing.

Yeah.

There were just so many, not only did, were we getting so many opinions, like you said, externally, but even internally. Like one day I had one idea and the next day I was like, this is not going to land at all. So I think it's been this kind of balancing act of, you know, surrounding myself with people who have done it, who have this kind of demonstrable track record that I can really rely on and can really trust. The other has been, you know, finding my own kind of footing and confidence as a founder and as the CEO with this kind of vision for the future, for what we're building in terms of culture internally, for, you know, how we wanna speak to the impact of this product. It's been really trial and error. And honestly, like a lot of self-reflection, as cheesy as that sounds.

Yeah.

But I have needed to look myself in the mirror and say, you can do this. And kind of give myself these affirmations that I can trust my gut as a professional, as someone with life experiences, as someone who could really benefit from a tool like this earlier in my career. And kind of be able to march ahead with that assurance.

I will just highlight that the kind of self-reflection journaling part I've always found helpful for anything in my career as well. Same type of thing. It's like, how do you know to sift through everything if you don't know what you think yourself? So it's like you have to do that through the self-reflection, through the journaling. All that helps a lot.

That's right. And I think I wouldn't be setting myself or the company up for success if I was just kind of a yes man, even if people are super successful and have walked this this road before. There's always something unique about your company. And I think being able to trust yourself and the kind of your core group is incredibly important. I'm really lucky to have co-founders that are super supportive, that also are able to kind of be my sounding board. They have really strong opinions and great opinions as well. And so we have a really good relationship there that really helps.

On that note as well, take me through building your own team, your own culture internally, as you are also building these tools for others. How has that gone as well?

Definitely. So I would— our founding team, we're a team of 3. So I'm the CEO. We have George, who I mentioned, who's a CPO, and we have another co-founder, Kyle, who is more of that COO lens. He scaled his home healthcare agency that he founded with his wife to over 600 employees. So he really kind of has that, that experienced business kind of lens that he's able to bring. We have also hired actually 3 engineers, which has been a grind, honestly, as you know, as I know other podcast guests have discussed. I mean, this is such a challenge in this market, but even just in general, being a non-technical founder, hiring technical talent is very challenging and it just requires you to speak a completely different language. So I think in terms of hiring, honestly, I will admit kind of coming from the HR world, you know, previously, I do understand what goes into a well-oiled hiring process. I'm able to kind of bring my own experiences to this to really understand the backend and what will be the most most, you know, successful in terms of attracting candidates. But I think when someone joins you, you know, in a pre-seed phase, you know, pre-traction, they really have to hook on to your mission. And we are such a mission-oriented company. You know, this is not like a machine learning, like deep, deep learning, I don't know, like company. We are on a mission to help the future of work. We are on a mission to have employees feel really, really good about where they work and really safe where they work. And so I would say that when we're thinking about hiring, it's really being able to tell that story and attract the kind of candidates who want to build something really impactful and that can kind of see the opportunity of joining a team this early and really being able to cast their opinions and thoughts and experiences onto a white canvas and really help us build something. I would say in terms of culture building, it's about really being deliberate. I mean, you have to kind of hire, you know, for culture first, really kind of, you know, making things almost like a mandate, I think. Like, you know, this is, this, we, culture is, it's not just an afterthought, of course. You know, we're building a tool that's going to help people, like you said, kind of walk through this process and do it together and do it really intentionally. So it's about kind of letting everyone know from the beginning, from the jump, that this is what we're about. This is kind of what, like, the artifacts of our culture are, really documenting the processes, really having everyone weigh in on our core values, weigh in on our mission. You know, we have these things written, but we want every employee that comes in to kind of Give their stamp of approval and kind of really make this an evolving process that everyone needs to get involved with and everyone buys into and everyone really feels kind of the shared responsibility of just like Vital does for organizations.

Stepping back from that, from like the kind of grand vision and mission you have for this, obviously taking a step back to then more so of the business model behind this, the pricing behind this, obviously pricing will change as time goes on, business models can evolve. How have you gotten to your current kind of business model iteration and where you're launching with at least?

Absolutely. So in terms of our business model, it's also just been a lot of exploration and user interviews for pricing. I think that when you're thinking about B2B SaaS, there really is kind of a kind of best practice there and sort of more of a tried and true business model. We're not really trying to reinvent the wheel, but we really want to be cheaper than our competitors. I would say there are a lot of really great tools out there on the market, but a lot of them are really robust. They are almost unwieldy, like unwieldy for smaller HR teams. They require kind of big HR teams to facilitate them. And as a result of that kind of robustness, they happen to be a little bit more expensive a lot of the time. And there are some smaller organizations, definitely in the SMB kind of territory, that really can't afford them. So right now, I think that our strategy has been to price low, to really being able to cast a wide net, to really get everyone that wants to be involved and wants to kind of, you know, start this journey of culture building, you know, to do so with Vital and not feel kind of restricted protected by capital. So, so yeah, we're doing this kind of, you know, tiered pricing model, no minimum spend at this point. And we're doing a PEPM per employee per month, you know, kind of standard. There's a monthly or there's an annual contract option. And we're kind of doing everything so that could be all completely self-service on the website with onboarding also, so that they don't need to kind of, you know, be behind this paywall of meeting with us and going through a sales sales pitch. They're able to kind of sign up on the website. And again, I don't think I mentioned this, but we are really focused right now on SMBs to start.

Absolutely.

That our sweet spot is below 500 employees. We think it'll be the most impactful for those companies that maybe don't have the bandwidth in terms of HR. They have a smaller team. They're really focused on the daily deliverables. Maybe culture is more of a secondary priority or an afterthought at this point, or something they can't really get to given kind of the scale of their responsibilities. So The SMB, you know, customers, they definitely have shorter sales cycles. They are able to kind of go through more of that self-service. So we really are building out our business model around that population. So we're definitely actively thinking through our go-to-market strategy. And we are, like I mentioned, kind of leveraging the best practices and experiences of our advisors. I think that like when you're thinking about the objectives of our go-to-market strategy, we really are trying to create, you know, brand awareness, really gain credibility in what is a pretty saturated space right now, and to really position Vital as the leading belonging-oriented product, the one that really is focused on belonging specifically. You know, we're definitely— some of the kind of like tactics that we're, you know, going to be employing are nothing groundbreaking. So when you're thinking about marketing, we as HR, you know, experts or consultants, we feel really uniquely positioned to write really great content. So that's something that we're definitely kind of leaning, leaning on is, really pumping out really good informative educational resources for our customers who are definitely searching for this on the internet. You know, like our customers are going to Google, they are going to their communities, they're going on LinkedIn, they're going on Reddit, they're going on Facebook, and they're asking each other. And they're getting kind of these shared experiences about how people are building culture, about how they're fostering belonging, about, are you, you know, experiencing the great resignation the way that we are? Are you also seeing high levels of attrition? So, I think that we're, we're definitely the content marketing piece is going to be really, really big for us. And, you know, really being a one-stop shop, even if you don't wanna sign up for Vital, just kind of knowing Vital as that resource that can really kind of help you think about culture.

Yeah.

Is gonna be really, really big. We have a research study that we are publishing. We surveyed over 1,300 business leaders and employees at the end of last year to really be able to break down belonging into something actionable. And so that research is gonna be going, getting published in a journal this summer. And we have a white paper coming out. Kind of in tandem with that in the middle of the summer to really kind of get people into the website as well. And again, just kind of being a resource, a hands-off resource. And then in terms of sales, I mean, this really is, it's such a great opportunity, I think, to build a loyal customer base in kind of the early sales process. So we're really thinking about nurture campaigns, you know, how we as the founders can really lead customer success especially in the early days and sales to really be the ones that are talking to potential customers, understanding if they don't wanna go with Vital, why not? Or do they have early feedback that we can leverage and really building another community of potential customers or just customers that are excited to sign on?

Yeah, I could talk about that stuff forever in terms of content and marketing everything. And I see actually a lot of companies, especially in the B2B space, So I'm in VC, you're on Twitter all the time. It's just kind of how it goes. Cause we find a lot of companies through Twitter, a lot of co-investors through Twitter, et cetera. And I see people writing about natively on Twitter, not on their own blogs, writing about either like culture or other things related to kind of B2B, it depends on what their company is. I could see that as being another route. Same thing you mentioned with LinkedIn, where you're writing content natively for those platforms, they perform better than if you're writing for your own blog. You do basically your own content on your site, but also then syndicate through these other platforms and the native content for those platforms. I think that does really well in terms of reach, which I I find fascinating. So I can see that definitely working for Vitals in that way too.

Yeah, that is honestly such a great point and such great advice. I think you're so right. It's really, again, it's this community approach to sales where it feels really organic. You're really speaking to people who are seeking out these kinds of opinions and looking to get involved in a conversation, not just be sold to. So people wanna engage, they wanna get involved, they wanna share their opinions and they don't wanna do it So we definitely would absolutely love to, you know, especially leverage something like a social media platform like Twitter. So hopefully soon.

One person who I always bring up, and because I just do a great job of this, Reuben Harris of Career Karma. Do you know that company? Okay. So Reuben Harris, I've had him on the show, my show once, maybe Violize Podcast once. Career Karma, they did a lot. So they basically help people get jobs as software engineers by going to bootcamps. And so if you're a software engineer, very interesting model they're using. I think if you look at how they've done it with deep, deep SEO content, so your point of mentioning how people are searching for this type of content that you could already use for Vytail, but then him as a personality on social, he's just always supporting others and sharing useful things in the industry and like you just, you can't help but be drawn to him. So I can feel like the same type of thing could happen in your company as well.

You're so— yeah, exactly. Like when, when do you lead with your persona and when do you lead with your product? And I think I think we all wanna live in a world where we think that our products are that life-changing, like, I don't know, like golden goose. And it would be amazing if the product could speak for itself. But I, as a founder, we as a founding team, we have a story. We come from this background.

Yeah.

That I think a lot of people can relate to. And we really, again, we've lived the pain points of our customers. So it's going to be really important for us to kind of build up our personas around that and really be approachable in terms of these founders who really are trying to change the industry because they felt the challenges.

Yeah, I know we're almost out of time, but what's next for Vytal? What's on the horizon?

Yeah, so like I mentioned, we'll be betaing this summer with a nice-sized cohort. We're really excited to get that feedback, to really be able to iterate, and then have a final release scheduled for later this summer. We would love to raise our seed round as soon as possible. So going to start kind of making those connections and kind of have an eye for that. In terms of product and the way that it's going to be developing on the roadmap, right now it really is this organization-level tool. We're going to be zooming down, looking really at teams, how we can really kind of get managers equipped to build culture and to really be able to kind of leverage the talents and even the personalities and skill sets of their direct reports just more effectively. And then, you know, from there we'll be trying to just seize culture generally and really become a one-stop shop for culture building, not just belonging.

Where's the best place for people to learn more about VITAL and connect with you as well if they'd like to?

Absolutely. So connect with me on LinkedIn, Yasmin Ebadat. I could spell it, but we'd be here for another 15 minutes.

And then— We'll show notes, we'll share it.

Yeah. And then vital.io is our website. There is There's a bunch of different places on there to contact us, to reach out, and we would love to even just hear feedback from anyone if this resonates.

Yasmin, thank you so much for the time today. I really appreciate it.

Thank you so much. This has been great.