Russ Heddleston, CEO of Distill, explains why founders should chase high-urgency use cases even if they're small or infrequent. Urgent problems drive repeatable customer behavior and memorable experiences. He shares how Distill marketed a horizontal technology vertically and generated significant revenue from customers who returned after long gaps.
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I'll usually, like, urge people to go aim for something that's high urgency, even if it's small, even if it's episodic, because it's better to be useful for someone than to be, like, generally useful for no one in particular type of thing. And that was, like, the episodic nature of fundraising is why we didn't kind of do that initially or focus on it. And that's also why we focused on sales for a while, because that's a never green use case. But when we went back to being a, you know, horizontal technology, but marketed vertically, the benefit of fundraising that we only saw after some period of time was that a founder would, you know, even if they raised or didn't raise, they'd go on and, like, remember it and they go use it in other things. You know, they'd take it with them. And we had a lot of, like, people would use it churn, then use it again, and then churn. So, like, our resurrected revenue was, like, really high.