How Rocksalt.ai went from Push to Pull

Hey Rob, welcome back. We've got something special today.

Yes, we do. We will see. I'm sure it will go well because we have guests, but I'm sure you and I will be a train wreck because we've never had guests before.

Because we typically are. Yeah. Why don't you give us a little bit of context and then I can introduce our guests and yeah, we can start learning about their pull journey.

Yeah, cool. Yeah. So this week we're doing something special, which is the Rock Salt team reached out with a case study on their transformation from kind of push to pull and. It's like, wow, this is, this is cool. This should way better than what I was gonna write about anyway. So I was like, all right, let's just, let's do it. And so we wrote a, wrote a post on it and gonna, gonna chat about it here.

Yeah. And we get requests all the time for, uh, like real life. What is, what it, what's the experience of founders? Like, can we do more case studies? Um, like how do we, what, what actually happens when founders and when companies are implementing the pull methodology and their sales process, especially early on. And so I think this is awesome 'cause we're gonna get a chance to see like in Rock Salt's case, what changed? How did it evolve? What were they tactically doing on a day-to-day? Are there other things, Rob, that you, like who is this for and who is, you know, what are some of the things that we might cover?

Yeah, I think, and the Rock Salt team can correct me, but I think like what this story shows is some extremely competent and effective people go at an early stage startup, but had traction, not, not at zero, early stage startup that's growing, that's doing well, how pull thinking can actually transform and help you grow way faster and like help make the business a lot, more, more intuitive, have customers rip the product out of your hands and all those good things. And so I think this will be helpful if you're at zero, obviously this, this will be interesting because you probably have an idea and are trying to find pull around it. But if you're also growing and just want to go vertical, I think this story would be really cool too.

Yeah, totally agree. And we're going to, we're going to hit, uh, choosing your ICP. We're going to hit messaging. We're going to hit discovery. We're going to hit, um, maybe a little bit of unfolding. Like there's a, there's a bunch in here that excited to dig into. Uh, well with With maybe no further ado, Arjun and Anita, we have brother and sister here, Arjun Murthy and Anita Murthy, who are— honestly, that would terrify me. I could not co-found a business. I love my siblings. I'm pretty sure it would break my family, like trying to start a business with, with one of them. But let me read a little bit of y'all's background and then I will pitch it to you to give us some of the context on Rock Salt. This is from Rob's Substack post for, for this week, which is titled Rock Salt's Journey from Push to Pull. We'll put the link in the show notes., the co-founders— I'm reading from Rob's words— the co-founders Arjun and Anita are brother and sister power duo. Both are brilliant and accomplished Waterloo computer engineers, former consultants, and MBAs with decades of experience in fast-growing tech companies. Arjun is a, uh, graduate school of business at Stanford alum and was VP of business development and channel sales at HubSpot in its early years and is a multi-time founder with a previous startup exit to Yahoo. Anita is a Sloan MBA and longtime marketing leader across a bunch of tech companies with a computer engineering background. All right, I'm not gonna try to describe your company. Can you do that for us?

Sure, I'll take a shot at it. First of all, thank you very much, Rob and Robert, for having us on. Man, hearing those bios, it's a little bit unnerving, I think, because it seems like, okay, some of those things sound cool, but boy, if you knew the story behind so much of it, you'd be like, Actually, it wasn't that impressive. By the way, you got very friggin' lucky. So, anyways, it's whatever. It's a CV, it's a CV. But if anyone's listening, it's not as glamorous as that might sound. And by the way, the part about working with my sister, just because you brought that up, Robert, I think it's interesting. Anita and I have always been super close. Like, she's been my big sister always. She is my big sister, and she's 6 years older. And so, I think that age gap, plus the fact that girls are always smarter than boys, as we all know, So then it was just like, it was much easier to just do whatever she said. And then she would bully me a little bit if I didn't, so that I just did what she said growing up. And I don't know, we've always worked really well together. It's also really good because with siblings you can argue and then like 2 months later you just get back to it like nothing ever happened. Because I mean, obviously we're trying to solve for the company. It's not like we're trying to boost each other's, you know, like break each other down because of our egos. So weirdly, I think for us it works much better. If anything, I'd be terrified of doing this with my spouse. Good Lord, that would break up the household. But I think the sibling is kind of, you know, we go off to separate houses at the end of the day. I think that's probably a good thing. Anyways, okay, so about Rock Salt, yeah, we're a startup out of the Bay Area. We help CEOs and executives raise their visibility in their industry. Typically, this is in places where their buyers hang out, LinkedIn, Reddit, and increasingly AI search results because those cite LinkedIn and Reddit. So we help these CEOs and executives find relevant conversations that their buyers are already reading having, show them how to be there, how to guide the industry's thoughts with, or their industry's viewpoints by sharing their own thoughts regularly, just being out there, being more visible, being more helpful. And the thesis behind this, in case you're wondering, is that these days, a lot of buyers, they just don't trust most things that comes out of companies. They're like, yeah, it's all a little too polished, a little too AI. What they do seem to trust a lot now are people. And increasingly the people that really have deep expertise or experience in a subject area. So, what we're saying to most B2B companies is, hey, your best marketing asset is probably your founder and your executives. Get them out there, get— make it easy for them to get out there. We know it's— they're very busy, and so that's really what RockSalt was. We said, we'll make it super easy for you to get these amazing founders and executives and subject matter experts out there because that's who your buyers will trust the most. So that's it in a nutshell. How'd I do, Ani?

You did very good, Arjun.

Can I ask a question? Because you both have like, I feel like the perfect background. Each of you has like the perfect background to come together and build this company. Could you talk maybe about your path to this thesis? I know Arjun, you were at HubSpot early, you saw inbound. Anita, you are marketer, you are marketing, you are all of that stuff. So, I don't know, maybe talk to me about like how this thesis came to be.

Yeah, no, that's a really good question. And actually, I think it's helpful to have that context. So, basically, I have been a user, like I'm a marketer. And, you know, in every company that I worked in, marketing was all about generating awareness. Trust and credibility at one level, and then obviously sales enablement and helping sales, right? On the first part of it, awareness and trust and credibility, the thing that I found was the best way to build that is when I put the people who are most credible and knowledgeable in conferences, on webinars, in front of prospects, in a customer board meeting, et cetera. There was instant trust and credibility because you are speaking about the problem space, which you have in common with a customer, rather than speaking about the product that a salesperson might be trying to pitch or a marketing person trying to push the company line without really going deep into details. So, these subject matter experts, I have always seen as the best way for us marketing to help build credibility in the space, right? So, I had this in the back of my mind, but, and when I saw the inbound playbook of create great content, optimize it for SEO, put it in Google, and you will have traffic start to disintegrate because you can now use AI to pump out tons of content. So there's an explosion of content. And second, there aren't that many people going to Google to search. So I was like, oh my God, like this huge part of marketing's playbook, the inbound journey that HubSpot perfected, I was like, I don't see how this is gonna work anymore. So, that's where I was coming from. And then Arjun obviously came from the platform side, having seen how HubSpot built that movement around inbound. And he was like, that made sense in that world of Google being the dominant player, but how does How is trust going to be now established in this new world where content is now, you know, dime a dozen and no one even believes it anymore? And so, you know, his thinking and my sort of background in putting experts in my marketing, whether it was in webinars or a Gartner conference or whatever, was kind of the genesis of the idea behind Rock Salt, which is that people will always trust people. And so, how can we make it easy for companies that don't have huge budgets to be in Gartner conferences and all these big plays to basically build credibility using their best people?

I'll add a little bit more color to it as well. When I finished the last company, The Factual, it was a news company. Brutally hard, brutally hard. And we got lucky and we got a decent exit to Yahoo, but But it wasn't like a home run, right? Let's just be honest. It wasn't a home run. It was like a single or a double in baseball parlance. And so I felt like there was a little bit of unfinished business. And honestly, I'd never want to do another startup. It was so damn hard. I was like, this is a terrible idea. And I wrote this blog post after we sold. It's actually on Dharmesh's site. Dharmesh is the co-founder of HubSpot. He runs this blog called On Startups. So I wrote this and I said 5 mistakes that I made as a first-time founder. Um, still there, you can read it. And one of them was not having a marketer on the founding team. And I said it was a terrible mistake because marketing is really hard. It's very tough for a founder to do product and marketing. Marketing is not the stupid mechanical stuff of like post 3 times a week and run this performance ad and tweak this copy. No, marketing is the damn strategy. It's actually the most important part of making this thing work, and I'm not that great at it. And so I said in this blog post, I said, I never wanna do another startup, but if I ever do it, I am for sure getting a marketer as the co-founder. I'm not doing this again without it. And then when I was at Yahoo and I still had this like unfinished business, maybe I should do this one more time. And then Anita was thinking about what she'd do next. I was like, oh my God, if I do this, I'm doing it with her. I'm not, No other way to do this. So that was a big part of it. And actually, for folks that are listening, I have immense respect for good marketing for this reason because it— maybe one thing that HubSpot kind of inadvertently did is it made marketing feel mechanical. Hey, just write some blog posts, and you do this nurturing sequence and landing page and all these mechanical things. And yes, that's the ops-y part, but don't forget that marketing is the strategy. I mean, there's a reason why Apple thinks marketing is so damn important that they marry marketing and product, right? And so that was like the big thing for me after the first time is like, if I'm doing this, I need a really good marketer and not like a mechanical person, someone that's driving strategy and we're gonna duke it out on where to take the company every day because that's what I need is that sparring partner. So that's why I think actually the partnership works is especially because I think I, as a CEO, the first time would've been terrible if I had the marketer, because I don't think I would've respected the marketer the same way. But after having gotten my ass kicked publicly for 6 years, I respect marketing a lot more. And I think that makes it much better.

I love that. Yeah. Can I, can I, okay. So we're at this point now where you're just getting drawn back in. You're like, all right, I have some unfinished business. Anita and you have this thesis. That's developing, it's coming in and you're, you're, you know, you go, you raise some money, business is like, like, talk me through businesses, like you're building product, you're doing the marketing things. That's point A. Point B is you talk to me. Can, can we maybe, can you maybe walk me through the path from A to B? And then RC, we can, we can jump to you, or was there something you want to jump in before?

Yeah, just real quick before we move on, I want to make sure like the idea for, um, or the way that I'm conceptualizing Rock Salt to make sure that I I understand it correctly, like I think Rob might be kind of the perfect example. Like he ran a webpage, like when you were talking, Anita, he ran his webpage was basically a Google Doc for like months and hit almost all, almost everybody who's listening to this, who's reading his, who's his blog found him because he was posting his own thoughts on LinkedIn. And so what you're saying with Rocksalt is like, that's the model. Going forward is like that new insights, building your own audience, communicating authentically, like no BS, or like speaking directly to what the ICP is. You got it.

You got it. Exactly. And, you know, every company has those people. They don't always, they don't have to always be the founder or CEO. It could be that, like in my last cybersecurity company, it was the VP of product. He was the person that we would put in webinars and tell him to go and speak in conferences. So, he would've been the person that We would say, you know, you're doing that once a year or twice a year. Meanwhile, you have these platforms where your buyers are engaging and active 24/7, 365 days. Why are you, why are we not enabling these people to be in those discussions and building credibility? Why are we not doing that when we know it works? Well, that's the genesis of Rock Salt.

Yeah, maybe the one other thing that's interesting about this, Robert, is a good expert in a company, and I suspect Rob embodies this to some degree, isn't always trying to sell. That at some level, they're just sharing really good information and trying to be helpful. That's the thing that builds the trust. It's like, you know, a really good executive understands the market's really big and the thing that I sell, it's good. And if you need it, it's gonna work. Like, but I don't have to be there all the time bashing you over the head with the thing that I'm trying to sell. And so I'm just putting good information out there. If it's relevant, you'll come, and if it's not, you won't, and we'll get on with it. I think the good executives know that. By the way, the good salespeople know that too. And so, what we're trying to do is to say, you have a bunch of people that are so good at the thing they do, just get them out there. That's it. They're wonderful when they're on stage, on LinkedIn, on Reddit, whatever. Do that regularly, be helpful. Man, you'll build so much trust, better than anything else that you could put out, which is like a sign up for my product thing. Like, there's a place for that, but your people have a lot more credibility to build. Cool.

I love it. Rob, sorry to interrupt. Jump back in there with your question.

So, to your question on A to B. Yeah. So, the thing is, we were at this stage where we were having, like, we had just sort of come out of stealth. And so, we had a lot of attention because we got funded by, you know, a tier 1 VC. So, we got a lot of, initial traction and we would talk to people and we would, like, everybody would seem really interested. We got lots of different types of people and everybody was really interested and everybody wanted to try the product. And so we were in this place where we were having a lot of calls, having a lot of conversations, and even closing a lot of sales calls, but then the usage would peter off. And then, you know, like they would just fall off the sort of the map. And we were trying to figure out why that is, like, and there were a number of different issues, but that was mainly the issue. And I think Arjun and I being as close as we are, like, you know, when you're founders, you think your product is the best and you know exactly why you're building it and what it does and the pain it solves, and you just assume Everybody just gets it. And so, you know, I thought it would be helpful. And at that time that, you know, that's when Lightspeed had put out something about Rob doing this sales coaching thing. And I thought, especially because I have only a marketing background and not a sales background, I wanted to, you know, see if I could get some coaching on how to do sales better. So that was really my initial thought was, I just need to do sales better because I'm a founder and I'm gonna be doing a lot of selling. And so that's when I went. So it was a very simple reason that I went to Rob first, but my very first call with Rob made me realize that even before sales coaching, there were a bunch of things in how we did the calls that needed to be fixed. In terms of discovery, who we thought was the ICP, and the messaging that we were doing. So then I pulled in Arjun and I said, "Hey, Arjun, I know you have sales, you have more sales experience, but I think R.O.C.K. can help us to clarify and focus these three things so that we can spend more time with the right people." rather than spend a lot of time with the wrong people, if that makes sense.

Yeah, that makes, makes sense. I guess let me, let me then push this to Arjun, which is, Arjun, you worked at HubSpot, you were the head of some, some fancy thing that had sales included in it. You're like, and also you're way smart. Again, I will repeat, you're way smarter than both of the Robs on this call. What do you, what was the kind of, was there like a mental blocker here? What, what was the thing that I don't know, maybe tell me about what was in your brain at this point.

So the truth is I was a little skeptical. I'm skeptical of everything, so it's not a reflection on you. I'm just skeptical of everyone and everything, I think by nature. And so when Aneel was like, we should talk to Rob, I'm like, yeah, okay, we'll see. And then, but I knew that it would be good for her because like she said, she didn't have much sales experience. And I'm like, that's good. You should, a third party is always helpful. It was helpful to me. It's gonna be helpful to you. We got one expected benefit and one unexpected benefit from talking to you. The expected benefit was huge in that we kept going back and forth between three different ICPs. They were CEOs, they were CMOs, and they were subject matter experts. And all of them seemed to like our product. And when we'd get on the phone, they all would kind of get it. And the CMOs especially, they're like, I'm sold, I'm sold. Like, we just have to get my CEO to do this. But then when we talked to you and we went through like, okay, so what happens after that call? And we're like, yeah, the CMO usually chases the CEO and oftentimes he or she doesn't get on it or is not bought in. And the SME, it's not critical because they have other stuff, but they'll do it if they want to. And then it seems so obvious in retrospect, but what you really helped us figure out was, you know what, just pick the CEO as the ICP and the rest of the stuff, don't worry about it. Like they'll figure it out. See, CMOs especially, they're smart. They'll see the copy, they'll get it. But if you pick one ICP, then everything you can focus around that ICP, the messaging will be tight. Your outbound, if you do outbound, will be tight. The expectations around their lifestyle, how they'll use the product will be clearer. Everything just sort of fell into place. So again, it seems maybe very obvious to people who are listening, but I found that very helpful. When you helped us eliminate 2 out of 3 people that we kept talking to and said, no, no, no, just focus on this one. The unexpected benefit that we got, and I might be jumping a little bit ahead in the story, but the pull framework, I thought a lot about why that was working. And I think what I've come out with is that it actually reflects the buyer journey that Anita and I and Rock Salt's kind of built on. Which goes something like this. Your buyers are finding out about stuff all over the place. LinkedIn, Reddit, scrolling, reading. And if they see something that's interesting, they will go and do their own homework. There's really not much you can do about it. They're going to read more. They'll click on your profile. They'll go and ask AI some questions. They'll Google you. They'll read your site, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They really don't wanna talk to humans. They just wanna get on with it. So, when someone decides to talk to a human, they're probably quite bottom of the funnel. They've done a lot of research. They figured a lot of stuff out. Let's get on with it. And Rob, I don't know if you recall, I shared like some call recordings before we started talking with you, and God, they're painful. And I would spend like the first 10 minutes telling people like the thesis of Rock Salt and this is why we were funded. It's going to be great and marketing change, sales changing. And you asked, you're like, why are you doing this? And I'm like, I don't know. I thought, wouldn't they, like, that's when they'll be bought into rock salt. And you're like, I don't think that's necessary.

And you were right. That's a surprisingly deep question. It's like, it speaks to like existential, like insecurity sometimes with founders.

But anyway, continue. I know, I know. Like, why was I doing? But when Rob said it, even after you asked it, Rob, I'm like, I don't know. Is he right? I think I should still say this. But what I came around to, and I think this is really what the POLE framework effectively espouses, is look, if you're on the call, that was huge friction to already get to this point, like scheduling a call, picking up a phone. No one's doing that unless we're serious, like let's get on with it. So go, let's figure out what are you trying to do and what's blocking you from achieving that success. And is the thing that I have going to help unblock you? Do you believe it's gonna help unblock you? Then great, then we're down to just logistics and pricing and mechanics and move. I think that was the big unexpected benefit. And actually what's funny is it's the thesis that we sold. We told our VCs like, no one wants to talk to sales. Like, you really need to have your experts out there, blah, blah, blah. So I'm like, shit, Rob actually did it better than I did. He's actually living this thesis and I'm just talking about the thesis. I should actually just do what Rob is saying. So that was the full circle for me.

Cool. That's super interesting. And I think you actually just described pull in that last piece better than I have ever described it, which we're just going to go back and we're going to go and take that. Okay. Tell me about, because I appreciate, you know, all the nice words here, but like what I actually want to get into is like what specifically changed? You mentioned the ICP. You mentioned the structure of a sales call. What changed and what was hard about changing?

I don't think it was hard, actually. I don't think, I mean, it was just we had to sort of build that muscle because we were doing it differently, wrongly before we were talking to you, before we talked to you. So, one was, I think Arjun came out of that first meeting, he's like, That's it. Rob nailed it. Like he just, it was an aha moment for him to say, we need to fix, we need to focus on the CEO. And we immediately went, we changed our messaging on the homepage to talk more to the CEO instead of the CMO. We did a whole bunch of thing. And then, so, and then we also, because of you, Rob, built a deck because, so the discovery, the basically our call completely transformed after we talked to you. So, first of all, we didn't start with this huge thesis and why we are here and what we believe and asking a lot of questions that, you know, were not necessary. We instead went directly to what brought you to this call, and when they said it, we started digging there. You said this, okay, tell me more. What exactly have you done there? What is the pain? What have you tried there? To really see if there was a real need. So, we just focused there and let all these other things that we would spend the first 15 minutes, 20 minutes on fall. So, we became really good at understanding if there was a real need and a buyer intent there. And then, and in that mode of getting to that point, we also, you told us to have this deck, and I think, I can't remember how exactly it came about, but the deck was really helpful in, again, structuring our, script, our sales script. We had a sales script, by the way, before. It's not that we did not. We had a very good sales script, which resonated well with people, but it, I think what, as Arjun said, it worked for a number of different personas. And what the deck did was be very clear about who this is for and who this is not for. And I think that was a big improvement in how we sort of did our discovery calls and how quickly we were able to get to where we needed to go. So, yeah, message, like the overall discovery call, like we just were much more focused. We knew who we wanted as ICP. We had this deck that was like really helpful in helping us tell a very tight story in a succinct way without being too wordy. And then, yeah, and yeah, so I think those were some of the benefits. And like I said, we were very quickly able to see the difference in the outcomes in, you know, where we spent time, which ones we knew would close, and being able to close them much earlier. Like before, we would have 2, 3 calls, you know, they'd be like, oh, that's interesting, we'll get back, and then this another one. But I think after our sessions with you and making these changes, We pretty much knew, like the person would say, yeah, I'm ready and I'd like to onboard after the first call.

First call. Yeah. Can I, so then can I take the, can I try to like put maybe my top spin on this of like how, yeah, please. What I'm hearing and then, and then I want you to react to it. So you had basically perfectly engineered a sales deck and messaging that resonated with many different people. And many of them would even sign up and, and, and use the product and, and, you know, some, some would continue, some wouldn't, and it was kind of, but, but you had something that worked. Yeah. However, there were these issues after where some people were using a ton and other people weren't using very much. It wasn't clear exactly what to do. And so the, the thing that you realize is that while Your market, the people who, the people who should want this would benefit from this. There's like, it's basically every B2B company should want it, would benefit from it, who ha— that has some sort of subject matter experts. However, there is one kind of person, at least there's one, there's one kind of person who is crazy not to buy it in, in the present moment. And that person. Is a CEO who's in a very specific situation where they know LinkedIn is important, have tried to post on LinkedIn, are trying to post on LinkedIn or whatever ones, Reddit, whatever. But, but they keep, they can't keep it consistent. And so they're just every day, they're just like, there's that like thing in the back of their mind of, I know I should be showing up, but I just, I, and, and that person in that situation closes in one call and is successful.

Yeah. Yeah.

Am I missing anything there?

No, that's exactly right. We defined a couple of attributes after the fact of what that CEO looks like. So what is the behavior they're exhibiting that says, that's it, you're my guy. I think maybe you, Rob, said it, or maybe I read it, that if your ICP definition is really good, You should be able to walk into a room with like 20 or 30 people and within a few minutes go, oh, these 3 people, that's it. Those 3 work. Everyone else is not quite ready yet. And so for us, the behavior that we want to see is that that CEO, usually CEO, is posting on LinkedIn at least once or twice a month. They've tried it. They're trying. It's just sort of not working. But it can't be too much. If you're posting 2, 3 times a week, you're probably too far off. Sometimes you can still find benefit in RockSol because we have this whole bit about helping you find the right conversations and comment. So in fact, some of our early adopters were posting a lot and came to us for that benefit. But the bigger chunk is, I'm trying to post, I just can't get into a rhythm. Once in a while I'll repost, what have you, and their follower count is somewhere between 2,000 and 10,000. So they have something to say. Some people seem to like what they say. They just aren't doing it correctly, rightly, et cetera. And so, so much of it just was, it, it became a really easy identifiable pattern. Anita, just look at, oh yeah, you're our guy. Oh nope, she's not ready yet. That I think made it a lot easier.

So you can basically, that's really, you can tell, most, most people that I know, you know, who, who go through this transformation to pull can tell in the first 2 minutes of a call if this person's gonna buy or not. You can tell before they show up to the call, more or less.

Yeah. Yeah. We know very well now. And if you do the call right, as I'm sure every salesperson tries to do, you want to tailor the call immensely right from the get-go. So right from when we pick up the call, Anita and I have already read everything that they've tried, posted, what have you. If we're asking a question, we probably have a decent idea what the answer is going to be, and we want to just double-check everything. So, hey, You're doing this. What's the thing that's working? What's not? I see this, I see that. Is this the ICP you're trying to reach? Okay, let's— this is what we can offer. Is that good? It's a much, much faster call. It's a sharper call and it doesn't waste their time as much. That's, I think, the biggest thing is I was wasting people's time a lot earlier and I feel like I do that far less now. Like if you're a fit, we'll know real quick and you're not, we'll get off it, but let's not waste each other's time.

And I just want to say, and I think we've kind of said this, but I want to make this very clear. You see, when we were doing the calls before, when we were going from like the big, like, you know, here's what's happening in the market and here's what's changing and here's, and people were nodding. They were like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. What happened is we didn't get to their specific pain point properly because we were here and they agreed, agreed. And they were like, okay, let's try the product. We give the demo and then we gave it. When we started going with the poll and go directly to what brought you here, we now, like, I now have, I now have segmented CEOs in buckets based on their pain point. You see, like, there are CEOs for whom the problem is posting consistently. For other CEOs, it's about the fact that they have no visibility into the pipeline. And they want visibility into the pipeline. For others, it's actually not posting consistently. It is what Arjun said, which is, I wanna be commenting and expanding my network and engaging in discussions that are happening on LinkedIn that I just don't know about, and I don't wanna deal with the LinkedIn feed. Those are three very different use cases, and we got to that because we were so much sharper to understand their pull rather than sort of, you know, go at the very general level, which everybody, all the personas agreed with and all the CEOs agreed with. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, show the product, let's try it. Right? But we didn't get to their exact— now we do. Like, and the fourth case, by the way, is I just have no time. I'm always traveling. We have the CEO, he's always traveling. So we have like this mobile piece where they can just text Rock Salt and create incredible post in 3 minutes on the go. We would never have got to these, you know, very fine-tuned use cases or segments of our ICP had we not been sharper in our calls.

What was it? One thing that I can't remember if it was Arjun or Anita, one is fascinating because I'm like, wow, you just checked all the boxes, like, on my side of things. So maybe I'm the ICP for Rock Salt in some ways, right? But one of the question I had is, you know, you talked about like CMOs loved your product early on, like they gave you glowing feedback. They were trying to champion it. They were trying to push it. Was there a signal or like what happened that you were like, oh, actually the CEO, like what was there? Did somebody buy fast? Was it, you know, you mentioned some of the results, but in the moment, how did you recognize the two?

I think that's exactly right. So we CMOs, we got tons of traction and then we You know, we, those CMOs, many of them were fractional, sold it internally to their clients, and then we got a bunch of clients. And again, many of those didn't work out in the initial days. And then we had this one case where the CEO came, contacted us, and like now is one of our best customers and expanded it to like tell 5 people in his team to use it. And when we asked him like the journey, he was, he had the use case where he was posting consistently but wanted to engage better. And what did he do? He asked his fractional CMO, and his fractional CMO had heard about Rock Salt and brought us in. And so that's what clicked for us, that actually the winning combination is not the fractional marketer or the marketer on their own. And CEOs are hard to get 'cause they're not Googling and searching for these tools. The winning combination is actually CMOs know about us and they bring CEOs who want to be on LinkedIn and they're showing some behavior that they're serious about LinkedIn, like posting regularly, et cetera, et cetera. Does that answer your question?

Yeah. Yeah, Raph, I'd love your reactions to that. Like, does that mirror like when other Founders that you work with have found their ICP, have like really found the one with the pull. Like, does that story, is that, you know, something that you hear often?

So I think, I think like Rock Salt has a very special case of this, which is that like their messaging resonates broadly. Their thesis is, is basically, uh, something that it would be weird if you disagreed with, which means everybody nods. When they hear the story there. That's not always the case. That is a, that is a useful thing to have because it means, you know, you're gonna start with these CEOs and then other thing, you're gonna expand beyond there and you just could expand basically forever on, on different kinds of case studies. That's great. But it's also a uniquely challenging situation to be in when everybody agrees in the thesis., but doesn't act in such a way as to pull the product out of your hands and keep using it post-sale. And so I think there's like a unique case here where it's, um, it's a unique kind of challenge, but it's not an uncommon one of, right? Like when I pitch, I'm just, I'm saying words, they are agreeing with the words and then stuff afterwards isn't going how I expect it to go. Like that's a very common sign that you are pushing. Something onto a market that's not pulling and it's not obvious why.

Yeah, I like that a lot actually. And by the way, from a product standpoint, it's interesting because Anita and I talk about this. You can do these things in products to gamify your product and encourage adoption and regular usage and engagement and all kinds of tricks, notifications and emails and stuff like that. And a little bit of that is a push. But if you really are solving a problem that's important, unless the product sucks and is really hard to access, people will probably just use it without you bothering them too much. You do need some amount of reminders, a little bit of habit formation. You don't have to go crazy over it. And so it's one of the reasons why we do have some of that in the product. But I hate the verb even gamify because I feel like I'm tricking my users, like, "Your streak is on, keep the streak alive." Like, piss off. Like, you would do this without the streak. You're doing it because you're trying to make your business successful, streak be damned. And so really, I think what you said, you know, like people would agree with the thesis and then afterwards things wouldn't go the way that we expected. What it was saying is that we weren't really doing a good job of figuring out, did they really need this? Like, it's good, but do you really need it? What are you trying? Like, if I wasn't here, what would you do tomorrow? Like, would you just die? Would you just be like, yeah, I guess it wasn't that important. So what happens if I'm not here? And I think we got better about asking that. And actually, Rob, you're totally right. The problem is everybody likes the damn thesis. So it was like hard to be like, well, so what, we're gonna say no? I mean, they wanna give us money, take the money. But you take the money and you do some onboarding and then like a month or two later they weren't using the product and what? What was the point anyways? So now we're just better about saying, yeah, I mean, by all means, you, you might find value, but we are much better at figuring out you, you will find value and I'm gonna spend time with you because you will be successful. And a year or two from now, that ICP definition will change. It'll be broader, it'll be different. We will keep changing this every year as the market matures and expands, et cetera. But right now for the next 9 to 12 months, I think it's exactly what we said and that's what I think you helped us zero in on.

That's super cool. Let, let me just like zoom out and, and give some reflections there and then we could, we could probably wrap it as well because I wanna be mindful of your time. You've been like this, this has been super cool. So the thing you just said there is really, really interesting in how pull and understanding who is basically blocked from the thing they are trying to do that informs your sales pitch, but it actually informs the product that needs to exist to deliver, to help them accomplish that thing, to unblock them. And if you find that you have to polish your product a ton, if you find that you have to add a bunch of nudges and stuff to be like, and if you find that you're doing a lot of work to like onboard them and hey, just following up, did you, did you use it? I didn't, I haven't seen you use it. That's a sign that you, there's something wrong and it's probably not to do with the product. It's probably to do with who you are serving and whether they had pull in the first place. And the analogy I would give there, and maybe you can tell me, tell me I'm totally wrong here, but I recall in HubSpot's early days, and tell me if I'm totally off base here, but the product wasn't always this magical, awesome product that, that worked all the time. That was great. I remember before, I think the Performable acquisition, It was, you know, there were— HubSpot's product was pulled out like people were ripping the product out of HubSpot's hands. Everyone was coming in, but they were using it and the product like actually had, you know, might have had some issues here or there or whatever. And people didn't care. They loved the product. They raved about the product. And so there's something about having to perfectly polish and put all the notifications and have all the features and have everything like perfectly Obviously we want that, but there's a very good sign when that's actually not needed. That means we know exactly we're helping them accomplish something, unblocking them in such an important thing that they're like, yeah, okay. Like in my, in my case, I'll just leave it here. From $0 to $1 million ARR, the product was me in a spreadsheet and I kept apologizing to our end customers. Like, I promise I'll, I'll get a login for you at some point. And they're like, I don't care. You're, you're solving this for me. I don't care if I have to log in or not. Like all I care about is best.

Yeah, I think that's right. Um, prior to the Performable acquisition, the product was not particularly polished or, um, even consistent. Uh, it had all kinds of weird limits. Like, a hilarious one was you couldn't send more than, I think, 5,000 emails a month with any account, which, you know, today a marketer would be like, dude, that's like a Mickey Mouse product. Um, But it worked because it was solving something that nobody else was solving at the time. It was clunky, it had all kinds of issues, but no one else had it. It was great. It was the all-in-one. It got you inbound. It helped you figure out, like, you didn't have to deal with blogs and social and all this. Like, I think early HubSpot got the thesis right. Yes. What Performable did when they came in was David Cancel, an incredible product guy, basically said, Okay, we need like a serious revamp and the architecture and all that. He did a total rebuild. But what he also got and what really the whole team got right is that we're kind of still like a, we're like a fringe, not fringe, it's like an avant-garde marketing thing. Like, oh, inbound, like, okay, that's, you know, it's cool. But what does marketing actually do most days? We send goddamn emails. Like you can talk all you want, I can blog and all that, but we send emails and your email thing locks out at 5,000. That's pretty much useless. So David and really the whole team, like from Brian on down, said we are going to make the middle of the funnel product offering, MOFU offering, be very strong. And that was email and marketing automation, stuff that we had historically stayed away from because it was a little bit too competitive. David built a great job of that. It was wonderful. And then he fused it into the rest of the product, which is now much more consistent. And now we had something that was both avant-garde and no one else had, plus the block and tackle stuff that we do every day. That's when the product really took off. And that's when, yeah, like people were just delighted because it's like, okay, now it's actually doing the thing I have to do every day. And yes, you could do this better and that better. Our initial workflows were terrible. Nothing like we have today. HubSpot today is so good on its workflows. Back then, it was Mickey. We didn't have branching. And we said, I can't even believe I said this, I'd go around telling people, if you have to do if-then statements or branching logic, you've already lost the market, okay? You don't have that many seconds. Like, just linear. And I'd say it with a straight face. How did I do that? It's terrible. And then over the years, we added it. So, But the thing is the base product worked for the thing that people really needed, which is I need to send emails. Does this work really well? Does it look pretty good? Great. I'm in. And then everything else is extra.

So yeah.

I love that.

Well, cool.

Well, I'll let you, is there anything you, that we haven't covered that you wanna make sure we cover? Any, any things you wanna mention? I, and we do not need to say any more nice things about me. You've already said like way too many and it's made me uncomfortable. So we could, we could, any other things on transforming from push to pull or anything else?

Uh, no, I, I, I don't think so. Uh, you know, it's, uh, look, a lot of your listeners are gonna be other founders. Um, I feel like sometimes if you look at the headlines at some, you know, it's like, oh great, you know, narrow in on the ICP again, whoop-de-doo, like get your messaging right, whoop-de-doo. It's like, it all seems like the same thing, but my goodness, is it really important? And then of course everything shapes up, the product shapes up, the website shapes up, the, outreach shapes up, everything sort of falls in line. Yeah, I think it's just, it's a really good exercise to do with or without Rob Schneider. Like, you should do this. Like, it's an important thing for every founder to go through this exercise and hopefully with Rob Schneider, but if you don't, like, it's still a really good thing to do.

Yeah, and I would say, I think with AI and the explosion of startups, I think a lot of people are going to be in the place where we are where your value proposition resonates with a lot of people. And so, honing in on your early adopter, understanding who feels the most pain that they want to rip it out of your hands, is critical in making sure that your product strategy and your company strategy actually are successful. So, I think it's really important.

Yeah.

Love it. Well, thank you. Thank you for reaching out. This is cool. I hope people like it. If they do, comment, let us know. If you don't, Also let us know, but I don't know how you couldn't like these two. They should be hosting a podcast anyway.

How can, how can folks find y'all? Thank y'all so much for coming on, but how, how can folks get connected to you and find Rock Salt?

Easy peasy for me. It's on LinkedIn, I'm Arjun Murthy, and on Twitter I'm Juice Murthy. It's my old nickname from college. Okay.

Anita, my LinkedIn is Amurthy and Twitter, I think, is AnitaMorthy, the full name, no spaces. And rocksalt.ai is the website. And you can reach us at anita@rocksalt.ai or arjun@rocksalt.ai.

All right, perfect. And I'll make sure that those get in the show notes so people can find them. Rob, anything else you wanted to add?

No, it was great.

Thank you all for coming. No, this was super interesting. Thank you all so much for joining us.

Great, and thank you for making this happen.