Identifying Product-Market Fit is Key - Nadja Komnenic - Revenue Today - Episode # 042

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Sales, marketing, and RevOps. 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 revenue leaders in our community to learn what steps we could take right now to help you scale yourself and your company. Revenue Today is sponsored by Rev Genius, and we're on a mission to bring inspiration and creativity to all revenue professionals in the world. Want to shout out our sponsor Demandbase. Demandbase is smarter GTM for B2B brands. They help marketing and sales teams spot the juiciest opportunities earlier and progress them faster by injecting account intelligence into every step of the buyer journey and orchestrating every action. For more information about Demandbase, visit demandbase.com.

We have the absolutely incredible Nadja Komenenik, head of business development at Lemlist, and she is a sales leader, keynote public speaker, and YouTube host. The head of business development, she is leading a bootstrap SaaS startup, Lemlist, where she has pushed growth from $1 million to $10 million in APR in the last 2 years. She is a mentor helping women coming into SaaS. Everyone, we are so lucky to have her here. Nadja, please take it away.

Thank you, Anna, so much for the lovely, lovely introduction. As Anna said, everybody who's listening, I'm Nadja, Head of Business Development at Lemlist. We're gonna have an amazing event today. I'm hoping you're gonna stick with the remainings of the speakers today. We have some amazing speakers coming up, and the topic is one of my favorites, which is how do you achieve your product-market fit and use it afterwards to actually sell better. So we're gonna talk about this amazing topic that I know that a lot of founders are right now trying to get their heads wrapped around. And we're gonna talk to specifically founders today or future founders that are trying to launch their businesses and how they can achieve their product-market fit, make sure that they validate it, and once they do, how they can use it to sell better. So I'm gonna start quickly with sharing my screen. As Anna mentioned before, I'm working as a head of business development at Lemlist, a French startup that managed to grow from $0 to $10 million in annual recurring revenue, completely bootstrapped. So bootstrapped, meaning people that we haven't raised any single dollars from funding. or spent any money on paid ads. And we managed to grow this fast in the 3 and a half years, starting in 2018 to today, where we crossed over $10 million in annual recurring revenue. Before we go into the topic of our call today, I want to first address all of you founders. I would imagine that we have a lot of founders here, and all of you future founders that are having ideas on the businesses that you're about to launch. And before we go into the topic, I would like to really ask you to today, throughout all of the events that you're going to be listening to, to really keep an open mind and try to push and hide a bit your ego aside. As the goal for today's events that you're going to go through is to make sure that— I would assume that all of you have some amazing, disruptive, crazy ideas that you think are going to stick and everybody's got— And it's going to be a potentially new unicorn. However, we really want to make sure today that all of your amazing ideas are actually amazing enough for a large portion of audience to actually want to, in the future, buy your product. And the way to do it is we're going to identify if you're actually close to finding your product-market fit, and if your product or service that you're going to offer at one point is gonna find their way to the hearts of your audience. So let's get this started. As I mentioned, I've joined as the first sales hire actually at Lemlist, and at that point we were at $1 million in annual recurring revenue. My goal at that point was to actually take everything that our founder has built in the previous 2 years and to create our customer client acquisition strategy. Now, the reason that I was able to do it successfully and grow from $1 million to now more than $10 million in less than 2 years, uh, was strictly because our founder has done a wonderful job in identifying our product-market fit before I joined. Uh, so to all of your founders, uh, if you're at one point looking to hire a new VP of Sales, do us a favor and actually pay close attention to what we're going to talk about today. So going to the next slide, uh, if I'm able to share it, or is anybody on the books? Perfect. In 2018, I'm going to share a quick story about Lemlist and how we managed to grow and find our product market fit. So throughout our story, we're going to share a lot of our mistakes, failures that we have made in the initial years. Hopefully it will help you avoid some of them. And I will share obviously our successes and what actually worked for us in identifying our own product market fit. So back in 2018, we had our 3 founders that got together and we decided to actually invest $300 each into building a product that will enter a super insanely competitive market. So we're talking about 3 French dudes investing $900 into building a product that is about to compete with the companies that was on, that were on the market for more than 20 years with huge amount of funding, army of SDRs that were selling the products for them. And we decided to build a product and enter this competitive space. Now, obviously a lot of network around us were telling us that might not be a good idea, that we're going up against like a mountain that we need to climb. However, our founder at that point decided to actually stick with this idea simply because he was an ex-agency owner that was actually using the tools that were on the market at that point and realized that there is a pain that none of those software solutions were offering at that point. So to give you a bit of more clarity into what I'm talking about here and what Lemlist actually does, we basically decided to build a sales automation tool that will automate cold emails. Now just ask yourself, and I would bet that every single person here on the chat already and on this event today is already using some kind of sales automation tool to automate their cold emails. Now us going into this competitive market and actually wanted to compete with all of those guys, was a very risky move, I would say, but at the end, we did know that at that point we had a very strong pain that none of the tools out there were solving, which is actually getting replies to your cold emails and doing it so by using actually personalization in your outreach. So today everybody's talking about personalized outreach, how you should add relevance, personalization into messaging. However, back in 2018, this was not such a hot topic. And Lemlist was actually the first tool to implement personalization features into our product. And that was the reason that we started to build Lemlist in the first place. So going to the next slide, basically going from the moment of us having such a huge, great idea that we wanted to validate, we managed to actually grow from 0 to $10 million in 3.5 years, being profitable since day one. As I mentioned, we were bootstrapped, so being profitable was a key focus for us. And we managed to do it with 32 employees. Now, the reason for this and such a rapid growth was literally because we were able to find a product-market fit. So this is what we want to do today, to avoid you from spending hours, months, years of sleepless nights, of investing your time, money, resources, relationships into building something that might not actually get you to where you want to be. And you might get to a moment where you cannot scale and you cannot increase anymore your business. And obviously, we want to avoid that moment and get you to the stage where you're actually able to grow without any marketing, without any sales in the initial stages of your business, simply because you are validating that you have your product-market fit. So going to the next slide, we're going to talk about right now, as I mentioned, Guillaume was at one point, our founder, was an ex-agency owner. He realized that there was a pain that we wanted to address. So before you even start building a product, it's not only about the demand that you potentially see in your market, it's also about what is the pain that you want to solve and making sure that that pain is existent in a large enough audience that you're going to be able to address. Going to the next slide, I apologize that I'm mentioning all the time, but somebody's helping me on the backend. The pain that we faced was getting the replies to the cold emails and the solution, the ability to personalized cold emails at scale. So our initial product was actually that we started implementing tons of personalization features into our product when we started building it out. And we decided to go with dynamic images. Can you just move to the next slide, please? I apologize for this very unprofessional way of me changing our slides. But what can we do? We're fine. This is me speaking as the first speaker today, so hashtag no pressure. So we decided to bring these personalization features into our product, adding ability to basically personalize images at scale to catch the attention of the prospect that we're reaching out. Prospects had the ability to obviously see their custom tags being added to the images. And then following that, we were able to actually add logos of the companies of the prospects that we were reaching out automatically into the emails. And feel free to just move through the slides, whoever is helping me. I hope, I'm assuming that it's Anna on the backend. So we were able to add dynamic logos into the emails itself, add video thumbnails and personalize them at scale. So if you're using right now Vidyard, Drift, and all of these video tools for video prospecting, we had the idea initially to actually personalize the thumbnails so that people, once they open the email, actually catch their attention, and then it will lead them to the landing page where they will be able to watch the video itself and have a personalized landing page for them. So these were a couple of initial ideas that we had on how we are gonna personalize Outreach at Scale and add features on top of what everybody else was offering.

Whoa, another great episode of Revenue Today. For show notes, links, and mentions, Visit revenue today dot live. For all my friends in the Rev Genius community, thank you. It's been awesome to spend this time with you. Please DM me any feedback and ideas in our Slack channel or on LinkedIn. If you're not in Rev Genius, join us at revgenius.com. It's free and it only takes like two seconds, and you'll be joining a group of 27,000 revenue professionals strong. We've got it. Looking forward to seeing you there. Catch you on the flip side. Thank you.