Startups that Find Demand vs. 'Conjure' Demand | w/ Rob Snyder

All right, Rob, welcome back.

Another week, another week, we are here. And that's it.

That's the, uh, the, the Bills. Uh, we're recording on Monday. The Bills won last night, so they are on their way to a record-breaking season, undoubtedly.

I mean, if, if they keep winning, I might even hang the Bills Stadium thing in the backgrounds. To make this seem less like a jail cell.

I like that you got— for those who are listening in audio, Rob has just a white background, like it's just a wall. And on the ground, he has an image of the Bills Stadium that's just begging to be hung up, but it hasn't made it there yet.

I mean, it's, you know, it's the classic case. I have pain points. I would certainly like to do it. It's not on my to-do list. I'm sorry.

Yeah, your 6-month-old daughter is not jumping up and down to hang up stuff in the background. No. Well, hey, let's jump into today's blog, which I'm excited about. One, in large part because there's a ton of news that I actually don't know how to read when it comes to startups. It's like Company A or Startup A just raised a massive Series A. It's imminent. It's always written as if it is imminent that this is going to change the world. It reads like A lot of the news, you know, if it's on New York Times, TechCrunch, Reuters, wherever it is that announces this, like it feels like, oh, this is— it is an imminent success. And then half the times, like, yeah, these become big things and a lot of the times they disappear into like— I have no idea actually what they become. Maybe they continue moderately profitable. They certainly don't change the world. Is that— is that the right way to interpret it? This— this blog is called Finding vs. Conjuring Demand. And actually, let me— I'm going to extend this a little bit. Let me read the first paragraph real quick just to kind of set the tone for what we're going to get into. Rob writes, startups do strange things like creating categories, creating job titles, and doing peculiar marketing stunts. It's hard to know whether the weird things startups do cause them to be successful or prevent them from being successful, which makes it very difficult for us to know exactly what to do. Here's my attempt, Rob. And what other context? What's going on? That made you want to, uh, you know, jump into this one?

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's basically this thing of like, I, I always see these startup announcements and news and things like that, and just like recently I've become more comfortable scratching my head and saying I have no idea what they're doing. And like, usually I see that, I'm like, oh my God, FOMO, right? Like, I should be doing whatever the random thing is that they are doing. I need to now buy a New York Times or a Times Square billboard or whatever the tactic. I need to build a community because this startup just raised X million and is going like this. And so, uh, it's just what I've kind of like zoomed out, you know, you in this game long enough, you've seen a lot of things where the like hot company from a couple years ago is dead today. And it's like, okay, how do I start to interpret what is happening? And what I'm seeing out there so that I can have a kind of sense of, is what this startup is doing absolutely stupid and insane and just like hype-fueled nonsense, or is there actually something underneath it? Which just serves the purpose for me of helping kind of further build out the framework and the kind of like models that we're working on. But it's also just like, how do I stay sane? When I see all this stuff that, you know, is probably 80% hype and then some of it actually works. Like, how do I, how do I know the difference and how do I kind of like build up a, a lens for the difference?

Yeah. And I, I think this is also important for understanding startup mythology. Yeah. Founder mythology. Um, we've, we've refer, you know, alluded to this in the past, but like Reading biographies of founders, uh, I forget the way you said it exactly at one point, but it was like they were on the brink of bankruptcy and then they got 100 million users and they took off. It's like there's, there's got to be something else that's going on that's not just, you know, cultural zeitgeist that just explodes and makes this happen. Like there's something underneath it, which feels like what we're, we're trying to, trying to identify here.

Yeah.

Exactly. Well, why don't we maybe before going, who is this useful for? Like, other than trying to help calm my nerves personally about not having a, you know, a $3 billion startup right now, like, who is, who is this written for? Who is this useful for?

I think there are actually two audiences for this one. It's primarily the founder who feels overwhelmed with both of the, like, FOMO of I'm not doing X or I'm not doing this yet. Like, should I totally change my entire approach because of that? That's one side. And the other side is actually, I've had a lot of VCs reach out, uh, about stuff like waves, rivers, and dams that we've written before. We're like, it's not clear that they have very refined models to, to not fall into herd mentality. And to actually see underneath the startups that they're looking at and saying, okay, is there something real underneath this? Or are they just doing a very good job of creating hype now?

Yeah. And, and part of the budget that happens with every raise is like a specifically a marketing budget that's dedicated to generating this hype. So on the herd mentality thing, it's just, I, I imagine it is intentionally made difficult for investors, for customers, for all these folks to understand if it's like a real thing or if this is, yeah, if it's just a passing fad. Well, let's get into a couple of the key terms that you outline. It's in the headline, finding demand versus conjuring demand. Let me give an attempt at this, Rob, and then I'll ask you to jump in and refine it. Finding demand is what we spend most of our time on this podcast talking about. Customers have a project that they can't not do. They're trying to solve it. They don't have great options. Like, that's the definition. Then they pull your product like that as you have found demand. When some— when those ingredients are there, conjuring demand, it seems to start with a founder saying something like, wouldn't it be better if— or like, it's, you know, it's, it's in the clouds, like it's, it's an idea of, of what, what could be. Um, how would, how would you define like demand conjuring?

Yeah, I'd say basically it's, it's founder has an idea of how they think the world should work and there's no evidence that the world is trying to go in that direction, that buyers are trying to go in that direction. And so the founder, In this case is like, okay, cool. I am going to become exceptionally skilled at convincing the world that this is how the world should work. And I'm gonna try to bend the world to my will. And I'm gonna do that through all sorts of crazy tactics. And like, and, and so, but it's all right. There really isn't the kind of groundswell of movement. Towards this already, it's found— it's the primary force is the founder trying to convince the market.

Yeah. And there— and these are often— it feels to me like there's a connection between them, which is like the founder is— and if they're— even when they're conjuring demand, they're within touching distance of, of something that actually is found demand. Or even when they're conjuring demand, sometimes they stumble across demand. They think that they're conjuring it. They talk about it like they're conjuring it later on, but really what they've done is they've found it without, uh, even sometimes without actually totally realizing that that's what they've done.

And the second, the second hard part on this is that the tactics might be identical between a startup that has found demand. They may do all the weird stuff that a founder who's trying to conjure demand is doing, right? They, you, the websites of these people look the same. In most cases, the right, like they may try to create a category as a like classic example of a, of a thing that can either be a response to demands or it can be trying to conjure demand. Right. And so it's really hard from the outside to tell. And so what I'm— and, and so, right, you can go crazy saying, okay, so I'm— should I be creating this kind of hip website? Should I be creating a category? Right. We're looking at the tactics on the supply supply side that are like increasingly weird, loud, crazy, and sometimes work, sometimes don't. And we're, we're, we need a way to interpret what's happening on the demand side and what, what needs to be true for these things to work.

Yeah. But let's, you have kind of helped to redirect me in a couple of points about what exactly is supply, because when I, my, default to thinking about supply versus demand is that supply is the product that you offer to meet demand. But supply is actually, as you define it and as I've come to understand it over time, is actually broader than that. It's about the messaging you use. It's like, can you just describe here, like, what is supply in this case?

Yeah, supply is like all the stuff that you control directly. And so that's, that's kind of like the bucket of it. And supply is basically your messaging, your product, your website, the things that you do. And it kind of often doesn't do this, but it in theory should take some sort of coherent shape that meets what customer, like that, that customers pull out of your hands.

Gotcha. Yeah. So in this case, like even the category itself, we'll, we'll get into an example here in a little bit of, of Clay, but like creating a category, creating a role, communicating about it in that way is part of the supply that hopefully the startup is using to meet, to match the demand that they're seeing. Let's— another thing that you talk about before, before we get into Clay, you talk about sequence. The way— this is what you write— the way to tell whether a startup will work is by looking at the sequence which came first, demand or supply. What do you, what do you mean there by look at the sequence?

Yeah. So what you want to know is, and then this is kind of like the punchline of the whole post, do you want to know if there was anything organic there, if there was organic motion there that existed that we are responding to? That's the thing, the motion, the, This has to exist. Otherwise, it's basically the equivalent of us going and trying to force people to move with, with increasingly elaborate tactics.

Yeah. And very, very expensive, uh, marketing budgets frequently, or sales teams or things like that. And increasingly annoying outbound emails. Um, can we, can we jump into, um, like an example? Is there an example from either one of the founders that you've worked with, or maybe from your first startup, what it looked like, tactic, like inside the startup, what it looks like when you are conjuring demand or when you are, when you have found demand. Yeah.

And so this is, this is the hard part because the tactics are basically, the things you're doing are the same, right? You're, you're asking questions internally like, oh, should we be creating a category? Should we be, um, right, like doing XYZ tactics? Should we be building a community? Should we have this kind of framing on our website? Should we be doing XYZ? Like, it's, it's all of these questions that you're having internally. Now, what tends to happen is when you're trying to conjure demand, you do these things and kind of nothing happens. Whereas when you've found demand, when there was demand organically, people are like, oh my gosh, right? This is exactly what I was looking for. This was exact. This is exactly what I was missing. So like, that's the difference. But the tactics that I think as we keep talking about this more, I'm realizing that like we have to separate the tactics. The tactics are a response to demand and they only work if demand is there in a sustainable way. They only work. We can do very elegant tactics or we can do things that are identical. On that are like, you know, I look at HubSpot, right? For example, they created the category of inbound marketing. Well, in order to be successful, I want to create a category of something that is also, so I'll create outbound marketing or whatever, nearbound marketing. Right. And there's, these things have actually been created by the way, like people have actually put, yeah, but, but it's like, okay. There's a, there's those can, they can get a little bit of traction on that, but the groundswell, it's not clear that the groundswell is there. And because the groundswell isn't, isn't there, or like conversational marketing, we'll get to with Drift, right? The groundswell isn't there. So all the stuff that we're doing, we can get a little bit of traction, but it's not the, like, it's, it's not working and it's not sustainable because 'cause the, the like market really isn't there.

And let's, let's talk about that groundswell for a sec. The, uh, the way that when I hear that, I think of something you've said previously, which is demand aggregates. It starts with every, all demand starts with one person trying to accomplish something. And a groundswell is actually just that you have identified demand that is widely felt by many different people. Top, maybe in, maybe in one role or maybe in many different roles, but certainly across a bunch of different businesses. And the only, only way to identify— it's not the only way to identify it. The best, the surest way to identify it is by selling. But another way to identify it is by getting lucky and conjuring it and going to the market with something that just happens to tap, tap into that. Is that, is that the right way to think about Groundswells in this case, Rob.

Yeah. So I think let's separate, right? There is a, there is demand out there. Right. And because there is demand out there and we kind of fit demand based on our tactics, we are going to grow often despite the things that we do. And, and so like, that's, that's the thing, like demand existing out there is just, it, it just is, it's a fact or it's, it's not, it's there or it isn't. And there's one person, there's a, there's a group of people who look like that person. And then maybe more and more people over time have this project coming onto their to-do list. Right. And that's like an objective thing. And like on our side, we can accidentally fit that demand, just clown car into a gold mine kind of, kind of quote, which is what, which is what Mark Zuckerberg said about Twitter back in the day. Right. Like that's how he described them. Right. And it, that's the, there's like this groundswell of demand that they, despite seemingly being incapable of, of building a functional organization, keeping the product up, right? They, they just like grew super fast. And then sometimes if that, if that groundswell isn't there, customers are not pulling, they're not like pulling you up the curve on, uh, you know, towards success, right? You can get someplace, right? You can get someplace with tactics that look similar or ones that are, you know, practice on FOMO and whatever, but like, it's just the thing, the groundswell isn't there. And like the stuff that you do will not work over the long term.

Yeah. Yeah. Let me, I'm going to push you a little bit on the tactics feel the same. Having been there for when you launched your first startup back in 20, I don't know, 2017 or something like that, 2016. I don't remember the exact year. And then having been around for your most recent startup that you've been building, the first time I would say falls square, fall, fell squarely into the conjuring demand, which was think about a, you're thinking about how to basically like as if you were framing a VC pitch deck, like here is how big the, here's the problem that we're trying to solve. Here's how big the market is. What you're doing now, which I would put in the finding demand category, is a lot like dozens of calls with customers trying to— I— and like thinking deeply about what they're telling you, trying to understand what their projects are. They're kind of orthogonal approaches. And actually, I think the tactics are pretty— they feel different from somebody observing the founder in both of these cases.

Yes. Okay. So yeah, this is, this is actually where the interesting part comes in. So as an outsider looking at startups and looking at news and seeing crazy stuff that I like don't understand, right? I like the, the filtering mechanism in my brain is now, okay, what has to be true in terms of demand, in terms of the groundswell of demand to know if this tactic makes sense or doesn't. But now, because I know that there is this demand stuff out there, my approach to my startup can be different. And your, as a founder, approach to your startup can be different because the way that we usually build a startup is like, huh, let's look at what Chloé did. Let's look at what HubSpot did. That seemed to have worked. So let's just copy paste the tactics there. That what, what they did, because we don't have this theory on the demand side of like, what actually, what actually are we looking for? What are we, what are we trying to find? Now that I know what I'm trying to find, I'm just taking the like most direct path there, which is not like YOLO creating a ridiculous website and trying to like evangelize a new category and like do all this kind of stuff. It's like, I'm just gonna go talk to a bunch of potential customers, put something in front of them and see when it feels like a dam is breaking in those conversations and then try to repeat that and then try to go from there. I'm just doing it bottoms up versus kind of like, you know, just YOLO it.

Yeah. Yeah. And, and, you know, if, if you, instead of like thinking about this and how to like implement it from a finding demand perspective, you watch the WeWork documentary and you're like, wow, like he just like led with personality and vision. And you know, it's, you lead with, you lead with hubris, you lead with like, you know, you're, you're talking at a different level. It's like there's a lot of like weird intimidation and like cultural tactics that are used to get people to conform to this. Like it's, it's, uh, they're just, that's obviously an extreme, but they're very different.

And yeah, you read like a Bill, you read a Bill Gates biography and you're like, wow, he was a, dick. And then you go to work and you're like, all right, guess what?

I, I know the path to success and there's going to be a trail of carnage behind me. Well, let's, let's jump into the Clay example. Let me give some background. Clay is a startup that has sales and marketing software. Like every startup nowadays, it's AI-enabled. They integrate in this Maybe actually before going further, the goal of this is not to pick on Clay. Like the goal of this is to choose an example that is in the news. They've recently raised like $100 million. So it's, it's a convenient on a $3 billion valuation. And so it's a convenient opportunity to look from the outside at something that's attracting a lot of media and then think about it through the prism that, that you've presented, Rob. So and you write about this one in the, in the, in the blog, but sales and marketing software, they integrate a bunch of different databases. Uh, the, the value proposition that they talk about is, you know, identifying new leads, narrowing leads into the ones that are highest quality, uh, you know, AI-driven marketing messaging, um, you know, making your most effective— is kind of their pitch— making your most, their most, your most effective, um, uh, like sales reps or BDRs more effective or like scalable across your organization. Um, They claim 10,000 customers and $100 million in revenue. Not, not yet profitable, but they say they're close to profitability, which, you know, do it, do what you want with that. But you present two possibilities for Clay's story. Rob, could you talk us through like the— they've found the man versus they're conjuring it?

Yeah. So, so the specific thing that, that caused me to write this, I saw somebody that I really respect write about a specific tactic that Clay is doing that this person says is total bullshit. Right. And it's, uh, what Clay has done is they, they don't just have this like interesting kind of spreadsheet software where you can pull in a bunch of data sources and, and do whatever you want with it, uh, targeted at sales and marketing, right? They, they are saying, okay, this is actually, there's actually a new role in the go-to-market organization that's emerging. It's the go-to-market engineer. And what that person does is they're basically like an engineer using a bunch of like different data sources to do different things all through the go-to-market, like, like journey of a customer. It's like, okay, cool. That's, that's interesting. The person that I know and respect is like, that is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. This is just them trying to create FOMO, just them trying to do double, like all this kind of nonsense. Right. And so that to me was like a, a signal to me. It was like, I need to actually think about this. Because I don't, right? I, I tend to have that sense, but I just tend to be kind of skeptical whenever I look at any startup trying to do some sort of like crazy thing saying the world has totally changed. I tend to be like, okay, maybe it has, but like the burden of proof is on, on you to, to kind of demonstrate that that's the case. And so the tactic of creating the go-to-market engineer created a ton of divisiveness.. And I saw, right, like, person I respect say it was the dumbest thing they ever saw. Another person I respect said it was the smartest thing they'd ever seen. And so I'm here scratching my head saying, and I, I'm, I know a bunch of founders were thinking the same thing of like, do I need to create a job title now? Like, what the hell is going on here? So, okay. So what are we looking for in this case? Well, what we're looking for in this case of if this is a good idea or not was like, was the organic demand there? That, that kind of like formed on the supply side into a new job title. And what that means is basically there was somebody who was, you know, kind of maybe had an engineering background or something like that, or saw themselves as an engineer. And they were really like, they were doing this automation work, doing all like connecting these data sources, but they, you know, maybe they didn't have the right tooling for it, or they were doing this and they were using Clay, but it was only a tiny part of their job when they wanted to be a bigger part of their job, but they just didn't know how to describe it. Describe it. Maybe they were a growth person or RevOps or whatever, and this was like a small part and they wanted it to be a bigger part, right? Like, and there's this kind of groundswell of that happening that Clay didn't really influence at all, right? Like Clay, Clay just existed and they fit what those people were trying to do and the go-to-market engineer role fit the kind of momentum that was happening there. So that's option one. That is like the, that is basically what I would have to believe. In order to say they were finding— this is like a smart tactic designed around fitting demand. They found this demand, they designed this tactic as a response to the demand and like, great. Now that's option 1. Option 2 very well could have been that in the Clay conference room, someone was like, all right, uh, these lemmings, what do we do to get these lemmings to use our software? Right. And it's, and, uh, and yeah, and so that, and, and so it emerged from that and they're like, well, you know, if we create enough FOMO, we can cash out in our Series C round, uh, through secondaries. And we can just say that this is changing the world, cash out and like, who cares if it's true or not, but we can create enough hype and get our VCs in on it. And like, you know, we can, we can kind of like just pretend like this is happening and kind of, uh, Forget what the term is. It's not gaslight. It's astroturf, right? Like we can astroturf this.

I'm, I'm not familiar with that one. What is, what does astroturfing mean?

Uh, I feel, I feel like it's like a, uh, uh, it's like a political thing of like seeding fake protests. I think like it's interesting. I think that's what it is. I could be totally wrong on this and we're, but, uh, I'm just going to throw that out and if anyone wants to correct me. Feel free to, but like we've created the new, the new category of astroturfing. As if this is a real thing, I might actually change this to be called astroturfing demand because that's a, that's, that's cooler than conjuring.

So, you know, a couple, couple of things come to, come to mind with this one. Like, Rob, why? Let's say that they're not committing fraud and they actually do have $100 million in revenue. They do have 10,000 customers. How, how is it possible that they could be conjuring demand? Is that, it's in, it's in and of itself not evidence that they've, that they found demand or what, like, what do I make of their revenue numbers, for example?

Yeah, I mean, what you can make of it, like, we don't know much from those revenue numbers because what if their subscription is $29 a month or whatever, or, or whatever it is and people buy it, but they're not really using it. Right? Like that, what does that tell us? That tells us that like, you know, they're able to get people to put in their credit cards, they somehow can't get their credit cards out. Like we, what we care about is not, is not like the static numbers or even like the dynamics over time. We care about the substrate of like, is this something that people are actively trying to do such that they are like, okay, if they were like, hey, Uh, these are all numbers. This is our growth rate. Our users have XYZ usage statistics and like probably a couple other things that I haven't thought of yet. Then I'd be like, okay, cool. It's, it seems like this is real deep usage that's fit into what people are trying to do and dah, dah, dah. But, but I just like, you can think of a variety of scenarios in which they can have that much revenue, which would be great to have. Better if you're profitable, honestly. But, uh, but, uh, would be great to have, but do not indicate that actually demand— there's like real demand there.

Yeah. Yeah. I think with, with this one, I suspect that there is demand. My question is, did they, do they realize that they found demand or do they actually think that they are conjuring like a new role and like how they, um, and that's the interesting thing about this, this tactic, right?

Could be total nonsense, but demand is actually there that their product fits, but they don't quite understand it. Right? Like there is, there's entirely the case that this tactic is nonsense, but that they have actually stumbled on real demand that they just don't understand and they're fitting it super well and they're growing. Despite the things that they are doing.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And their, their history, reading a little bit about them, I think they, I think they raised their pre-seed like in 2016. They're, they're a company that was around for a while tinkering in something else. And then when they— the way that they talk about it, they turned to, you know, marketing and sales. And that's when I think they— whether or not they realize that that's what they were doing is they tapped into something there, whether they can with all that baggage and history and with all like, you know, 3 or 4 rounds of fundraising, whether they can be a profitable company, I think is a separate question. But I suspect they've stumbled into it. But the idea of creating the go-to-market engineer, like, is an interesting thing to look at from a— is that a— like, this is just the new— it's part of the new lexicon in business. Like, we are— like, that was— it was already headed in that direction and you've put a name to it. Or we're trying to put a name to something in order to generate demand, which doesn't have as deep of roots as, as you would like it to.

Yeah, we're trying to make fetch happen, right? Like, it's not— it's essentially that.

Well, let's, you know, something, something else while I was reading about Clay on their, on their YouTube, if you watch their, like, the intro video about what their product is, the end of it, literally in the last 20 seconds, you know, the young man says, if it's hard to get a straight answer to what is clay or what does clay do, that's because your imagination is the main limit to what you can do with it. Which I was like, I like— that's, that's like the most ambiguous articulation of demand that I can, I can possibly imagine.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, okay, cool. But, but the thing is, right, companies can do a bunch of stuff like that, which is like, you know, hey, if, if you don't know what Clay does, you're an idiot and you should probably think bigger, right? Like the, but it's, it's funny, like if there is real demand there, cool. Things like that, which I think are nonsense, but like, who cares? Like the business will work despite that kind of thing. Or maybe, or maybe there's a certain kind of person who has a certain kind of demand that, that fits. I don't know. Yeah. Again, I don't know, but what we have to do is we have to say, okay, that kind of thing, the, the creating the go-to-market engineer role, the, like all this kind of stuff, right? That's all supply side. That's all tactics that can only really work over the long term if there is something that it fits on the demand side. And so it's been really helpful for me to purge like the, oh, I need to do XYZ tactic because this other company did XYZ tactic. It's really useful to purge that from my brain and say, okay, what's the theory of demand underneath that tactic, that company, and do I believe that is real?

Yeah. Yep. And you talking through that makes, reminds me to you talking about some other startups that some incredibly successful startups that Everybody who's listening to this would probably would know who you describe, like talking with their early, you know, early employees are like, yeah, we were running around with duct tape on referring to the product. But that can also refer to the marketing. It can also refer to the sales, like all elements of supply. It doesn't have to be perfect if what Clay has done in this case is actually tap into demand. It's like kind of okay that they can't clearly 100% of the time articulate everything that, you know, their, their product would do.

Totally, totally. And I think we should jump into the Drift example too, which is like the, the other side of this where, where, um, so I am, I am to be clear, I am a big fan of Clay. I'm a big fan of Drift. I think these companies, I think the founder of Drift, David Cancel, is probably like my favorite writer on product, period. His book Hypergrowth is like required reading for thinking about how to build products and how to structure engineering teams and how to run engineering teams. He's, a fascinating, brilliant guy, and he built a fascinating company of very smart people, like ridiculously talented people throughout Drift. And they were trying to conjure demand. They created this, they tried to create this category of conversational marketing. If you don't remember, Drift was like the website chatbot that, that was on a lot of B2B websites. Um, and they had, they kind of expanded to a couple other products. But like, they tried to create conversational marketing and it just didn't stick. So this, this tactic on the supply side that is done by the smartest, probably people who are way smarter than me, way more talented than me, work way harder than I work, and it didn't work. And that, what that tells you is just how hard it is to conjure demand. Right? If the smartest people can't do it, then it's like, okay, cool. I need to go and find demand and decide on my tactics based on what's on the demand side, because people smarter than me cannot conjure demand. Yeah.

What, what did thinking about Drift, thinking about Clay, let's say that you had been approached, um, about investing in one of their early rounds. Um, what would you be looking for to understand if this was a founder team that had, that was trying to conjure demand or that had found demand and were trying to fund, uh, fund that?

Yeah, like basically the question that I would be asking is, and the thing I would be looking into is like, what's the organic evidence of demand in the market. So like, I actually remember Drift's pitch deck, um, for some reason, I don't know why. In Drift's pitch deck on their kind of like proof of demand slide, I remember it was like message— the use of messaging in consumer contexts is going through the roof. And they showed the usage of WhatsApp. They showed the usage of all these other things. And you just see all these curves going straight up. That is actually not evidence that business people are trying to use messaging. That is evidence that consumers are using messaging, right? I would be looking for evidence that business— of that groundswell of demand around the business thing versus the consumer case where, for example, Clay could say, hey, listen, there are these people who are called RevOps people. 80% of their job is actually doing this kind of thing. They're not paid to do that. They don't have the right tooling to do that. Here's a bunch of examples of people who are struggling. And when we put our product in front of them, they not only ripped it out of our hands, but they're using it every single day constantly as part of their workflow. It fits that, right? Like, that's what I'm looking for.

Yeah. Like a clear articulation of here's the job or the project or the job that is, that a real human being is trying to accomplish that this fits rather than an alternative framing of Clay is there's a lot of these, you know, all these databases that exist out there, like they're disjointed. Like, look at, you know, thinking about like the number of databases increasing. And so, you know, somebody needs to combine these with like an AI layer on top of it in order to pull it, like, which is a different framing of a similar product.

Yeah, there's so there's the like objective market logic, objective market logic, which like saying, right, all these data sources, there's a bunch of data sources. Sales is hard. There is an opportunity space here, right? That's, that's a kind of compelling VC pitch potentially. But what that isn't is that isn't a demonstration of demand. The demonstration of demand is there's a person who is desperately trying to do this has no good options when we put our product in front of them, they rip it out of our hands. There's a bunch of people who were just like that. Their usage is going like this. They are finding us. They are talking about us.

Yeah. Where do, where would the go-to-market engineer come into a deck like that? Thinking about Clay, is it like, here's our marketing or is it, here's what they're starting to refer to themselves as, or where, where do you For, for like a pit, like a investor deck for like their Series F or whatever.

Yeah. How would I, I don't know. I, I don't know and I don't care.

Like, yeah, maybe anything else you want to, you want to add on this before we get into like some of you, you've pulled it back actually a couple times to the practical implications, but there's a couple I want to, I want to read specifically. Anything you want to add before we get into the implications of this? Yeah. No. Well, you, you list a couple in the, in the newsletter, which we'll, we'll link to in the in the show notes. Um, one of them is when you see a successful startup doing something strange like the go-to-market engineer, remember that you can't see what's on the demand side. So it's next to impossible to tell whether the startup is building, uh, interesting supply that fits demand. Anything you want to add there, or is that one we've, we've hit enough?

Yeah, we've hit that. I think that's like the takeaway here is, uh, well, there's, I'd say there's kind of two takeaways here now that we've like riffed through this. One is like, when you see things that are happening out there in the world that seem like they're either brilliant or stupid or whatever, like zoom out from the tactic, kind of put the tactic to the side for a second and ask about what's on the demand side to try to understand or say what would have to be true on the demand side to know whether it's a good idea or not. Right. That's thing one. Thing two is in your world as a founder, whoever, right? Like, figure out what's on the demand side and decide the tactic or the approach on the supply side that best fits it. And it, and you can be comfortable knowing that it, if it's something weird, like the go-to-market engineer approach, right? Which could be a toll booth, right? We talked about this before, right? It could be such a good thing that it's a toll booth approach. But like, when you think of something weird on the supply side that, you know, fits demand, doesn't look like things that other people have done before. Then like it doesn't matter if people have done it before or haven't done it before. Right. It matters if it fits demand and probably the weird things that you do that other people would be crazy to do, but they really fit the demand you've found is like, that's probably what's going to cause you to go parabolic. Yeah.

I love that one. That was the second one I was going to call out, but I, the, how liberating it is from, you know, common understanding from traditional knowledge, from all these other things. When you have really, it's typically a proprietary like understanding of what demand is like, that lets you do things that make no sense to anybody else except for the customer that's pulling it out of your hands and saying like, this is, thank goodness that, you know, something like this exists. Like, where do I, where do I pay? How do I get started on this?

Totally.

Um, cool. Rob, anything else on, on your mind before we wrap?

No, this, I feel like this post and this conversation has been me kind of working out the pieces here. So if this feels a little bit jumbled or if I feel, if it feels like we're kind of jumping around, this, the purpose of this podcast, the purpose of this writing is to understand stuff. It is not, it's, that's it. It's like, We're trying to understand why do startups work when they work? How do we build a model for that? And so hopefully you appreciate the fact, and hopefully this fits your demand because it certainly fits ours. And so yeah, it's really, it like, I've viewed it that our job, my job is to figure this stuff out. And try my best to communicate it and create frameworks for it. And it's kind of messy as I do that because there's all these kind of examples and questions that come up. And so my, my posts, my writing or podcasts aren't, I don't think they're going to be tidy all the time. And that's, well, it's okay by me.

And yeah, maybe if you've got, you, if our listener has a different take on these examples, or if there's other case studies that come to mind, or questions, or if they want to like poke holes in, uh, things I've said or things Rob has said, like jump in. Like, that'll help refine, um, you know, refine the theory, um, added perspectives. But with, with that, why don't we, uh, end it here, and we'll catch everybody next week. See y'all later.