Ameet Mehta: Growing a Startup from $0 to $2.5M in Revenue

Everyone, how's it going? My name is Eihan. I'm the head of global growth at the Founder Institute. We have an exciting webinar for you today. Thank you so much. We're doing these new timings. I think this is our second one to date. It should be 6 PM Singapore time, 2 PM Dubai time, I guess 3:30 India time. So thanks so much for everyone joining. Eid Mubarak for those who are celebrating. Appreciate you taking some time off on your Monday to be with us. We have a pretty exciting webinar planned today. We got Amit Mehta who's going to be talking about how he built his company to about $2.5 million ARR. And yeah, it should be fairly exciting. He's prepared some dedicated slides. While Akshay brings up Amit, you know, we had about 500+ people register, so we should expect about, I would say, 200 people. We're at about 111. It's adding, so thank you as people are joining in. Let us know in the chats where you're coming in from. It should be pretty interesting. I'm seeing a lot of different addresses already. We see Japan, Birmingham, Kenya, Mumbai, Croatia, Frankfurt, Sofia, Austria, Bangalore, wow, Nigeria, Japan, I said, Liberia, so Israel. So Amit, you have a pretty international audience for you today. Do you wanna unmute yourself and say hi to everyone?

Yeah, thanks Ayan and everybody at the Founders Institute for inviting me and more importantly, all the guests that have come here as well. Looking forward to walking you through my journey. I'll go ahead and Ayan, if it's cool, can start with the intro and then get right into it.

Yeah, I guess before we just start, let's, I have the polls, let's run the poll. So what will be helpful is, you know, let us know, like, where— we have 134 people— like, what type of company are you running or planning to run? You know, at F5, we're an idea stage incubator, so like, or early stage accelerator. We have a lot of different ways of describing ourselves. But, um, all right, so we have quite a bit of people coming from SaaS, about 50% of the audience. Cool. I mean, hopefully this is helpful for you as you're planning out your presentation. Uh, awesome. So we have— I think that's a good number. So we have about 50% SaaS, I think. Uh, yeah, is this helpful for you, Amit?

Yeah, absolutely. Our experience is deep into SaaS, uh, so I think it's gonna be valuable, uh, to the team and the folks here.

And for the people that are not coming from SaaS, what would your— like, is the content still— hopefully it's so relevant, right? Oh, absolutely.

I've done it in that manner for sure.

Okay, perfect. I'm gonna hide the poll from stage, but if people wanna still vote, they can. Some quick housekeeping and just how we're gonna run this. Samit's gonna present for about 20, 30 minutes of content. After that, we're gonna switch to more live Q&A. So there's a Q&A button on the right-hand side. So please, if you're doing this from your tab, either your tablet or laptop, it's easier to see. If you're doing on mobile, I think you have to look at the menu, but look at the Q&A button. You can submit a question. We'll bring those questions up towards the end and answer them. Once these, the Q&A is done, we'll try to end on the hour. You'll see different virtual tables, that's kind of the networking portion of this event. You know, feel free to jump onto any of these tables, ask more questions about what you've learned today, ask more questions about FI, ask questions about startups, whatever you want to do, you know, that's really your time to network with each other. All right, with that being said, Amit, floor is yours. I'd like, sorry, I'd like to self-introduce yourself because I'm sure a lot of people already know who you are, but maybe if you want to give a high-level intro to yourself and then kick off with your presentation.

Awesome, thanks, Ayaan. So my name is Amit Mehta. I am the founder of First Principles. We are a tech holding company. We currently have 7 companies in our portfolio. And we do about $6 million in revenue across those companies. And we've acquired 2 of those and founded the rest of them. So here we are picking one of our companies. It is a SaaS company that we grew from $0 to $2.5 million, pretty much bootstrapped, and it is profitable. And that's what we're gonna be talking about here today. So let me share my screen and then we will go from there. Any questions, feel free to go ahead and drop 'em in the chat the way that Ayan mentioned it. One second. All right, so let's get started. So I'm gonna get right into it. The way that I've broken this down is basically breaking down the journey from 0 to 2.5 in increments of $500,000. In revenue. So yeah, that's what we're going to do. So I'll ask the first question. So what are the key elements that you guys think that you need to get started? If you had to say if there are a couple of elements that you absolutely needed to get started, what would be those two elements? Feel free to drop your answers in the chat. Money and co-founder, of course. Revenue model with idea, idea and market, passion and domain knowledge. All right. Idea validation, product. All right. We, oh wow. We've been vision, customer, product. I'm seeing a lot, a lot of different answers here, which is great. So problem is a good one as well. Yeah, let the— I'm gonna let the answers come in. Yeah, so one thing that Getty kind of talked about here is knowledge about the field, and that's definitely one other people sort of mentioned that as well. So from what we have seen, and again founding multiple startups and acquiring a couple as well, is Strong domain knowledge is extremely critical. And let's kind of talk about that first before I get to market timing. So strong domain knowledge is you typically need to build a product that is at least 10x better than what's there in the market for you to actually be able to break through and build a company, especially if you're looking for a large, if you're looking to build a large company. In that case, we should definitely look at strong domain knowledge someone that's been there and done that. So whenever founders are looking at ideas, the key thing that we recommend is solve your own problems rather than anybody else's. We all have some experience and the goal is to definitely go ahead and focus on those experiences and what's the critical pain point. For me, across our orgs, we have over 120 people and one of the key things that we look for, one of my biggest pain points is people operations and HR. So all the ideas that I'm personally thinking about right now are within that space. So whatever is close to you, whatever your pain point is, that's definitely something I would focus on. And the other one is market timing. So it is really, really critical to make sure that you have the right market timing. Let's say you start a crypto company right now, regardless of whatever domain expertise you have, it probably is probably not gonna go, go very far. Let's say you go ahead and start an AI startup right now, there's a good chance that this is a good time for you. So those are two things that is what you typically need. Those are the two things that you need to kind of get started. And as these guys put in, I'll pop in the Q&A and yeah, from time to time and then we'll kind of go from there. The next question is, how do you get started? So I talked about, hey, you need market timing, and then along with that, you need strong domain expertise. What are some thoughts when it comes to how do you get started? You guys can drop in the way that you guys talk to customers, of course. Outbound, of course. En coming in hot there, of course. Product, POC, MVP, team. Here I see repeatable sales model. You actually do not need a repeatable sales model to get started. Your first goal is to just get a few customers, and I think everybody here is sort of attuned to what we need. And you actually don't need a strong IT team either, uh, that can come later. Finding a market needs to happen before. Here I see a lot about MVP, proof of concept, et cetera. Quite honestly, you don't even need an MVP. All you need is a landing page and a clickable prototype. And this is where you don't need a dev team, you barely need a designer, and you can actually do it yourself. One of the things that we kind of talked about here is you don't need product market fit either. The goal here is to get started. Not to build a company. So to get started, community would be awesome. With that said, if you just have a landing page, which you can go ahead and create on Webflow or a lot of landing page builders, that and a clickable prototype, you can use a tool like Mockflow. If you have some tool, you can go ahead and click, create a clickable prototype. And a clickable prototype is even a smaller and scaled-out version of an MVP. There's no code. It actually is a full clickable version of the application. So if you have that, you should be able to start, yeah, Wix is a great option. You should start, you can start reaching out to your customers and you are able to see if there's actually a demand over there. And you can use outbound to reach out these customers. You can use PPC, spend $1,000 to see if people actually land on that page. And if they do land on it, have a sign-up button or have a buy now button. How many people are actually clicking on it? And some of the best startups that we have done is people are actually willing to pay an advance. Hey, when this company comes out, I'm putting down my credit card and when the product is available for use, you can go ahead and charge my card. So that's sort of what we need. So kind of going back, as you can see, the trend here is it talks a lot about, hey, yeah, Figma works great. You can definitely use Figma. People think you need a team, people think you need to have a tech background, people think you need a repeatable sales process. You actually don't need any of that. If you have an idea, literally within 48 hours or realistically even within 24 hours, you should be able to launch just with you and your laptop. So I hope that's some encouragement for people that are sort of in the pre-idea stage or the idea stage of, hey, I need all these things to do something. So yeah, I'll go on to the next thing. Let's say you got a landing page and a clickable prototype and there are a few people that wanna sign up. So what's the next thing? How do you get revenue, right? So let's say you are able to build an MVP and after that, how do you get revenue? So yeah, what are you guys' thoughts about that? "But where are you marketing it?" So to answer that question, Lavinia, you can market it with PPC, so through Google Ads and things like that, or you can use outbound email, referral marketing, call to action, subscriptions. All right. So yeah, so the first thing you really need to figure out is honestly, if you guys, if the business is product-led or sales-led. And what I mean by that, and this is very specifically driven towards SaaS companies. So one is being product-led. This is where you are, your product is selling itself, right? A product like Zoom, a product like Lemlist, or all these companies where you actually sign up online, you don't need to talk to a salesperson, and are paying for that tool. Airmeet likely was not where a salesperson got on the phone. People signed up online and did that. So you either have product-led or you have sales-led. Sales-led is where you are actually getting on the call, doing demos, and then selling the product in that manner. So before you even figure out what your revenue model is or what you do, you really need to figure out what your revenue model is gonna be. So here, if it is product-led, you need to partner with someone that has distribution. So one of the things that people kind of talked about here is, hey, I want to build a community. Building community takes years to do. It's not easy. It literally takes years to do. So rather than building your own community, you can go and partner with a bunch of people that already have a network and go ahead and sell through their network. That's something that we've successfully done. There are a ton of mastermind groups. There are a ton of social media influencers, especially in today's day and age, that have an audience but don't have a way to monetize it. So use and leverage that audience to go ahead and monetize those folks or monetize their audience and give them a cut of the revenue. So that's that. And then while you're leveraging someone else's audience, make sure you are also going through and building your own distribution channel as well. So that's that. And if your product is more sales-led, which a lot of these companies, which some of these SaaS companies are, make sure there's someone that's focusing on sales full-time. So this could be one of the co-founders, and that is something that a lot of people do, or go ahead and hire yourself an account executive. If you are not a salesperson, go make sure you have a budget and make sure you go hire a salesperson. Now there are also websites such as Closeify where you're able to hire commission-only salespeople as well. So yep, so I hope that helps. There's some questions here, so I'm gonna go ahead and answer them. What is the best platform to generate leads? So I would say beginning, Edwin, outbound email works exceptionally well because the cost of doing outbound email to generate leads is not very high and it works at scale as well. Other than that, just pure networking, going to events and things like that, that's definitely something that we can do. And yeah, if you guys can go ahead and put your questions in the Q&A section, that'd be great. And yes, this section, this video is recorded. I see the record button here on top. There's another question by Arpit. It talks about But for product-led, 2 initial customers need to be reached in person. For product-led, you do not need to reach out in person, you can, you know, it's product-led.

Awesome, thanks Amit. Let's kind of jump into the Q&A. First of all, I know that was short and brief, but I think the idea of this presentation was to get the folks thinking and then start asking questions to make it more engaging as possible. So if you found Amit's stuff useful, you can see there's some emojis. You can press 1 for clap, 2 for love, 3 for thumbs up. So I'm going to give Amit— Oh, he got a couple hearts. That's good.

There we go.

That means it's coming in. All right, so let's kind of flip over to the Q&A portion and then I'll probably throw in a little bit of my own, but Yeah, folks, so please upvote the most popular questions. So take a read, we have 3 questions right now, I guess 2. Try to make it as relevant as possible to today's content. So Mary, let me throw this up on stage. Mary's asking this in me, it's like, you know, how do you deal with a product idea without building an MVP? I think you already talked about this. You said, mentioned building a clickable prototype. So maybe, Do you just wanna talk a little bit more?

Yeah, absolutely. So I totally get this. We ourselves have built a ton of companies where we didn't have the cash to do so. So yeah, to Ayan's point, or what I had mentioned earlier, you can literally build a clickable prototype and you can literally draw it yourself. You can use a website called Mockflow. It's the simplest way to build a prototype, Mock, M-O-C-K, Flow, F-L-O-W.com, and then Once you have built that out, you can go to Upwork and find someone to go ahead and make it into a visual design that is also clickable. So that's sort of how you would go ahead and do that. So Mary, I hope that answers your question. The next question is—

Awesome, yeah, I'll go through them, kind of bring them up for you so you're not kind of reading them because I'm reading them ahead of time and I'm just trying to pick ones that are more relevant. So this one looks interesting. Nikolov is asking like, what portion between products and design to solve problems and products which are adopted to use because of a trend or great marketing strategy? Another way of looking at this is like, hey, should I be coming up with a product that solves a genuine problem, or can I go and take maybe a Western proven concept like Uber and apply it to my local market, right? Which we've seen that work there and there.

Yeah, I mean, of course. So what's the proportion between products designed to solve problems and products— Yeah, so I mean, definitely, I think, sorry, and to what you were saying, I think both of those things definitely work. So yeah, I mean, if you have a problem that has already been solved, there's a solution in place, feel free to apply to your local markets. And in terms of the question, also kind of talked about should you go ahead and solve a true problem? And yeah, I mean, absolutely always solve a true problem rather than relying on marketing. And that would be the goal for sure.

Awesome. We have, so I'm just gonna burn through as much as these questions come in just so we can kind of get through as many as we can. So Ian is asking, you know, for revenue, you talked about product-led versus sales-led, is a subscription-based model, in one of those two categories? So I guess more productized services.

Yeah, so is this subscription-based product? So I think they're talking about, so like a SaaS company that's subscription-based, so that's a SaaS product. Yeah, so SaaS companies can be product-led or sales-led. Product-led is where you go online and sign up. So if you use Calendly, if you use Google Apps or whatever it might be, or Spotify, that is product-led. You didn't talk to a salesperson, you went online and you basically signed up for the product. On your phone or on the desktop. So that's product-led. And then sales-led is where you actually talk to a salesperson. There are a lot of products that are sales-led as well. So yeah, it definitely applies to subscription businesses for sure.

Just one thing on product-led folks, if you go to fi.co/youtube, maybe actually throw the link in there. We had last week Wes Bush talking about product-led growth and he does a really good job of explaining what product-led is. If you're a little bit confused on what that terminology is, go check out the previous video. It's super, super helpful. All right, Amit, I'm gonna give you a hard one, all right?

All right.

So Saber is asking, you know, like he's been told that he needs to build an MVP to get funding and a clickable prototype is not good enough. So like maybe take a step back and tell the audience what's the importance of the clickable prototype and like what are the baby steps as soon as you've done that, like what you should be doing because I think people are thinking that they can go raise funding with a clickable prototype where, yeah.

Sure, so a clickable prototype is to validate an idea and by actually getting people interested in it. And the biggest validation is if someone's willing to give you money off of the clickable prototype. For one of our companies, we had $30,000 in advances, not promises, but we had $30,000 in the bank off of a visual clickable prototype because we were like, oh my God, I need this product. When is it gonna be available? I'm giving you money right now to develop it. So, and the other thing is there's this, just the way that startups have, whatever it is, people have this crazy rush for investors. Your biggest and best investors are customers. See people that are willing to fund your idea who are actually customers. That's when you know you have solved a great pain point or get their credit card signups. As soon as the product is ready, you should be able to go ahead and, charge their credit cards. And when it comes to like building out an MVP, for anywhere between $15K to $30K, you should be able to get an MVP out the door. So yeah, that's that.

Yeah, and the reason I brought that question up is a lot of people ask this and like just to summarize the way I look at it is clickable prototype, get advanced customer payments, that showcases validation as Amit said. After you have that, you can go wherever, you know, there's like, depending on your geography, you can use like revenue-based financing. You can go to angel investors, be like, hey, I already have this amount of money in the bank from customers. Like, can you help me now develop an MVP? So it's not you're using the clickable prototype to raise funds, you're using the clickable prototype to get pretty much early customers, right? And validate it and then go from there. And that's kind of where I'm personally seeing at FYI, a lot of people, there's a disconnect. They'll go spend a lot of money getting an MVP done, and then they go and try to get the customer, and then the customer's like, hey, I need a little bit of this, I need a little bit of that, or they have the MVP and then they go to investors, where both approaches are wrong. What Amita said is the exact thing you need to do. Go build a very lean, let's call it a lean MVP or a clickable prototype. Do whatever you need to do to get your first dollar in, and then once you have that, you can then go and like, whether you wanna raise money, whether you wanna do debt financing, your options become a lot more. Well, thanks for that, Amit. I mean, I'm gonna— Lavina's asking, how much should you be spending? I guess for the purpose of this, doing your validation stage as you're thinking of, okay, you got your clickable prototype, how much should I be spending on Google Ads partnerships and something like Let me add to this is like when do you call it? Like when you said like, hey, this isn't working out. Like when do I raise the white flag and be like, okay, this like, how can I go back to the drawing board?

Yeah, I mean, so this is an open-ended question because we don't know what stage or what the budget is. With that said, what my biggest recommendation is to always pick one channel, see if you can validate it, and then only then do you actually move on to another channel. So if you're doing like 4 channels at the same time, it typically is not going to work. And there have been a lot of people that talk about this. Pick one channel and if that channel is going to work, it's going to work, generate leads for you and help you get to the next stage. Until you get to $1 million in ARR, you typically, honestly, one channel, maybe two should suffice. It's only really once you hit that $1 million in ARR, you're like, okay, I need another channel. And it's not until the $5 million mark is when you actually truly need another product on top of another channel. So I hope that helps as well.

No, I think that's great. I like the fact how you said go channel by channel. So I just had one question, just So I like this question, it's interesting. How do you kind of build trust with the, I guess this individual's asking specifically for healthcare, but like how do you kind of like build trust with your product? With building up trust so the individual on the other end can be like, okay, this company seems trustworthy, I'm willing to put my credit card in, I'm willing to pay these guys whatever it is, MRR, monthly amount. Right? So how does the product build trust? Yep.

Chris, this is a really great question. Quite honestly, do things that are not scalable. Give them the call, you know, be available. And we still do this quite literally for one of our companies. It was Eid and one of my co-founders was celebrating with his family. And then we literally saw him on the support channel responding to a customer query. And we have a team of like 4 customer support people. We have a manager in place. And as a founder, he himself is still responding to tickets. So what I would say is do things that are non-scalable. If people are expecting you to be on the call, go ahead and do that until you are able to build that trust. And once you are, then go ahead and sort of start serving them the product in a, you know, without the need of the call, but always have that option. So I hope that helps answer the question.

Yeah, that's good. I think I know which founder you're talking about and I think I saw him on the support channels. All right, let's, this is an interesting one. Garov's asking like, how do you kind of deal with customer rejection? Keep in mind our audience is mainly early stage founders, so they're not as used to customer rejection as maybe you and I are. But like maybe let me add to this is like, what can you do with that customer rejection?

Yeah, I mean, I think this is where you make, you know, you always look at things from a positive perspective. What you wanna look at is why they rejected your product. Is it the product itself? And if so, what specific features? Is it the pitch? What is the reason that they're rejecting? And make sure you figure out what the close lost reason is. So when we look at our sales pipeline, there's this thing called close lost. So you're closing the deal because it's lost and then there's a reason and what is the reason? And typically there is where our product team gets the features that they need to build next. That is the thing where our marketing team actually understands which competitors are beating us and why. So I hope that helps is understand the reasons why and focus on that.

Yeah, the only thing I'd add to that is iterate. So understand why and if there's enough, like if 7, 8 people have said the same thing, your pricing or we need this feature, then you should take that into account and be like, okay, I should be building this into my product or really focusing in on that. So I actually like customer rejection because I'm kind of like the ones like, okay, well, why? Like I keep probing. Obviously the ones who haven't watched anything from Steve Blank on his YouTube playlist, highly recommend it. He talks about customer discovery and all of this is kind of leading up to that, right? So Aviral is asking, like, you know, being product-based, uh, you can't really meet customers. I think he means physically. Could you explain what if it's— I guess if you're in a consumer-based product, right, rather than SaaS, and you say, hey, go talk to your customers or go like meet with them, and you can't really, uh, what would your thoughts be on that, right? Because maybe some of these products are like $8.99, or let's say you're an e-commerce company, Right? So what were your thoughts?

You don't, so yeah, I mean in that case, quite honestly chat works really great. So for companies, let's say it's e-com, quite literally whenever you see a person on the website and now there are enough tools out there, hey, you're shopping for this product, can I actually help you with this product? Become an advocate for the product that they're selling and don't do it in a salesy manner. Just do it as you'd be helping out a friend shop for a product. Hey, let's say you sell like, I don't know, you sell baby clothes. It's like, oh hey, how old is your baby? Is it a boy or a girl? What's the favorite color? Are you looking for indoors or outdoors? And just help them. So yeah, I mean chat is a great tool that you can use to proactively reach out to your customers even if you are not physically in person with them.

Yeah, I would go back to what Amit said earlier, especially if you're early stage, You want to do things that don't scale. Like even if you're D2C or e-com, you probably still want to talk to 1 or 2, I would say probably 10 or 15 people who are going to be purchasing your product and still doing those user interviews or customer interviews and be like, okay, why do you like this product? What does it appeal for you? Is it a marketing play? Is it a utility play? Like just really try to understand that user psychology, right? Amit, how are you feeling? We're kind of doing lightning round questions. You You still good to go?

Yeah, this is great.

Yeah. All right, Chen was asking, when do you actually start charging for the B2B SaaS product? Could you start charging at the MVP level? And I think 'cause you mentioned like you wanna be charging the credit card, but like, so you wanna be getting the credit card information but charging it when it's released. So like maybe clarify when exactly is the charge happening? Like you have your clickable prototype, The customer inputs their credit card details. Are you charging them right away? Are you waiting? Maybe just walk people through that.

Yeah, absolutely. So basically I would say charge as soon as your customer's willing to pay for it. As I said, for one of our companies, we literally had $30,000 in advances before we literally wrote a line of code. They're that desperate for the product and their customers that could pay. We take their money, right? And there's some comp— and at the latest stage is when your product is ready. So you take advances from people and then go ahead and basically charge their card when the product is out and ready.

Okay, perfect. I have a follow-up from Sohail. What's the best pricing to use for your MVP when you're planning on doing this?

I mean, it really depends what's the best pricing strategy during— I mean, it really depends, right, in terms of what your product is, but typically Being at a competitive pricing to whatever product is out there or even lower is typically a good way. But that is also sort of a catch-22 because whenever you're charging lower, you always get customers that are SMB or that churn a lot faster. So I wouldn't say that the cheapest price is a long-term strategy unless and until that's the business that you wanna be in. It should be to get your initial customers to get some validation, But over time you always wanna be focusing on the mid-market or the enterprise. So ideally your product should be actually one of the more expensive products that are out in market, but it should also be providing the value that's out there. Should be providing the most value for a dollar that everybody spends, but it should not be, yeah. So I hope that helps.

Guys, another way of looking at pricing that I would recommend is like really think about like what can I get for the same amount within the same industry? Like for instance, if I'm coming up with a streaming platform, you already know Netflix, I think they're still at $9, $10 a month. You'd be like, okay, for $9, $10, the people are going up to the competition, the people can go to the competition and get like a plethora amount of content, right? So like if I come to market with a $100 price tag, like I gotta have something that's 10x better than Netflix, right? So in your respective industry, like, you know, let's say if I'm coming up with a new CRM, CRMs are free right now in the market by HubSpot and all these other ones. So it's like, well, do I, can I really afford, can I go and charge the customer $100, $200 for CRM when the competition and a significant amount of the competition is at $0, right? So take into consideration the competition and understand what the delta is with the value you're providing, right? Like I think that's the most helpful piece of advice I wish somebody told me when I was like kind of starting out in SaaS or starting on business because I'm like, yeah, yeah, like, I'd build up my whole revenue model based on it being $50 per user per month. And the reality is like the user's not willing to pay $50 per year. Like, you know, and that comes to be like, you come to learn that through good customer development. All right. Yep. All right, Amit, what metrics should you be measuring in your clickable prototype from, I can't even say, Vyacheslav, I hope I said that correct, from Ukraine.

Cool. First thing, I hope you're safe and hope things are all right. When it comes to what metrics, the biggest metric is again, number of credit card signups and number of people that paid. I would say that's sort of the whole, like that's sort of the key metric that I would look at. And under that is basically how many people, like how much time did a person spend on the clickable prototype? Do they go through all the features? So when it comes to sort of the early stage, honestly, from a metrics perspective, it's probably more qualitative than quantitative because you're actually, yeah, I'm just sort of seeing how a person is playing around with, around the prototype. But if you're looking for a key metric, I would again definitely look at if someone has been willing to pay for it.

Awesome. Let's move on. Muhammad's asking, he's like, hey, is it not hard to find a commission-based person before the company's starting to generate revenue? And at least at least have a few clients. I guess another way of looking at this is like how do you get your first salesperson into the door when you have $0 in revenue and your product is still 50/50?

Yeah, I mean there are websites like, you know, tryclosefy.com so you can potentially use that product to get it. And then, you know, if that doesn't work, the founder's the best salesperson and yeah, go ahead and sell the product yourself. Until you find that. So those would be the two answers is there are enough sites that are doing this now. And if you're not able to find someone where your product doesn't have enough value for a salesperson to sell it, then yeah, put on your, yeah, put on your tie and start selling.

Yeah, I agree with Amit. The founder's the best salesperson. And I guess another way of thinking of it, if you're a CTO or a more technical-oriented person, the best thing to do is like go and find somebody maybe with those people skills. and you really, the only thing you need to do, the one thing you need to do then as a founder is sell your co-founder on the big dream and the vision, and that you're the ability to go and build on that, right? So I think don't focus on finding a salesperson that's commission-focused. Find a co-founder or find like someone you can give equity or the founding team, whatever you wanna do, but make sure you can sell them on the full vision end-to-end and be like, hey, listen guys, this is what I'm trying to do. This is how much the potential is. Potential is, how much time can you dedicate towards doing this? And have that conversation. I kind of hope that helps. Apreet here is asking, I guess 'cause you mentioned maybe because of product-led, what's a good trial amount or how long should you be giving your product for free?

7 days. We've tested out a lot of different, we've done it from 30 days to 60 days. 7 days because what ends up happening is a person can make that buying decision pretty quickly and if they have not used it in 7 days, I promise you they're not going to use it in 30 days. And if they do, they'll reach out and be like, "Bro, can I get another 7-day free trial?" Go ahead and extend it. But no trial should be more than 7 days.

Okay, let me, I find that very interesting. Let me add to that or let me ask you a follow-up to that is, How do you identify what's the most, like what are all the key actions a person needs to do to get value within the first 7 days? Are you just going to be like, hey John Doe, here's your trial for 7 days? Or are you doing a lot of like, are you doing onboarding? Are you doing a lot of that? Are you doing product tours? Are you doing anything to facilitate that journey within the 7 days?

Okay, so basically when it comes to products, especially at the early stage, the product is not large enough for someone to need more than a couple of hours at the most to be able to understand the value of it. So they have made that decision within the first 7 days. And yeah, absolutely, if you have product tours, if you have a success team that is actually pinging them, absolutely go ahead and leverage those tools. Our data has basically told us that is whenever you have a 30 or 60-day trial period, even 14 days, it does nothing but basically push off sort of your revenue generation cycle and you're just gonna be spending time with leads that are not gonna convert. So yeah, so that's the reason we keep it 7 days. We continue to follow up with people through email marketing or through within the app itself saying that, hey, how could we have helped you and things like that. That's definitely something that we can go ahead and do, but that's sort of what we have seen from, again, actual data of 7 versus 14 or even 30-day trials.

Okay, that's fair. This is a good segue into the next question from Youssef from Tunisia. He's like, how are you converting your early adopters to customers? Um, so like maybe walk somebody through a typical like flow. Are you like, a lead comes in, you get them on the phone, do you do like a demo? Like what's, what does that process look like end to end?

Service-based description. So let's say service-based description might be, let's say you're selling like SEO or some, some service like that. So in a service-based subscription model, I think there are two things that are really critical. One is case studies. So you have done this before, and specifically if you have the same niche, let's say you sell to real estate agents, let's say you do SEO for real estate agents, then have a few case studies that you can kind of showcase to them. And two is just go ahead and showcase your value by specifically listing out the ROI for them. So if you just tell them that, hey, I'm going to do all these things for you, let's say again, it is SEO, like ranking them on the first page, what value is that actually going to drive to them? Them being number one on Google for real estate agent in Texas doesn't really do much unless until you tell them like, hey, You know, you're going to get 30 more leads. Each lead is worth, I don't know, $100 for you. So hey, I'm going to be generating $3,000 a month for you and I'm going to be charging you $1,500 to do so. So that's sort of how you would go ahead and validate the need there.

Perfect.

I love it.

All right, Gaurav, I don't know if it's the same Gaurav we mentioned, I can't remember, but Gaurav is asking like, what are some goals you can kind of set to hit 2.5 in ARR. Maybe also walk the audience, like how did you kind of like, you mentioned you went through the validation phase, you generate revenue, but like how did you scale? Like maybe like at a very high level, what are the parameters you had to put in to scale your product, to scale your team, to scale everything?

Yeah, I mean, I think the first, yeah, so I mean, yeah, maybe we can send out this deck later. It really walks through like what are, that's exactly, what this is, where, how do you, what are the goals that you should be setting up for each stage and at every $500K marker. So basically let's say at the million-dollar marker, you should be, you know, really investing in strong engineering teams, in a QA process, monitoring systems, building a strong support system. At $1.5 million in ARR, you really wanna start building out your middle management. So your second line of leadership. Uh, so yeah, I mean, happy to share that deck, uh, post this call if that's helpful.

Yeah, so for everyone, you should get a recording fi. for this, um, event. All previous recordings are live on our YouTube channel, so if you haven't checked it out, do check it out. Subscribe to us as well, fi.co/youtube. It's all— will all be there. Amit's recording— this recording will be up within a few few days. And then yeah, we'll send out the deck to everyone as well. All right, we got a lot of upvotes in this question. It's like, how do you reach out to institutional clients? You know, I guess cold outreach is not an option because they're not getting to the decision makers. And then this is a little bit about their product, but I guess how do you reach out to decision makers at big companies is another way of looking at this to make it more generic.

So I would say 3 things. One is if you have emailed them and they haven't gotten back to you, I think you just haven't tried hard enough because honestly email has been an incredible channel. But let's say that is not an option. The second one would be to go ahead and go to the events that these guys are attending. So there are events that these people are attending and you'll see how accessible these people are. So that would be the second option. Let's say that's also not an option. The third one would really be going ahead and building a brand or an audience for yourself where you are the subject matter expert for whatever product that you're building. So they already know about you. There's literally someone on Twitter, the 26-year-old kid who reached out to Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, and he responded via tweet. The reason is because that dude has an audience, right? So if email doesn't work, Go to the conferences these people attend, and if that's not an option, build a really strong audience.

Yeah, you gotta stalk people kind of online, but like to Amit's point, like hit them up on Twitter, hit them up on LinkedIn, comment on their post. Like you wanna hit, like it depends how important that connection is to you or that prospect is to you. You wanna hit them from multiple angles, ask for a referral to that individual if they're important enough. But also like I see this a lot like a lot of people do this wrong in cold outreach is that they'll assume like using Amit's example, Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce is my point of contact for this global HR solution. Wherein it's not like Salesforce is a very large organization. There's probably another individual responsible for it. So like also think like, is this the right person to actually use my product, or is this the person who just asked, I'm trying to reach out to, to get an intro to the HR manager, right? So that's kind of more like an outreach tactic you need to determine, right? Um, let's move on. We'll do maybe another 5 minutes of questions and then we'll break up into the networking tables. Um, how is everyone enjoying the event so far? Use the emojis to give us feedback. Thumbs up, heart, claps. Okay, Michi's still getting a few, a little bit of love in there. All right, let's keep going. Overall is asking, you know, if a few customers want features, how do you know what the majority wants? So like, I guess what's the right number? Like, like, sure, um, customers say they want it, like, should you hear 2 customers, 3 customers, 5? And I guess, sorry, let's make a distinction here, customer versus like a prospect, right? So maybe walk the audience through that as well.

Yeah, absolutely. So a prospect is someone that hasn't paid you, a customer is someone that obviously has paid you. So honestly, this is exactly where domain expertise is so, so critical. You should have that hunch gut thing that, all right, this is what we should be building or hey, this is not important. The best founders know what they should be building. And honestly, Steve Jobs said it, right? Like in a sense where our customers don't know what they want, it's your job to figure that out. So customer validation obviously is one important piece of it, but it should be you as a product visionary that is figuring out, all right guys, this is what we need to build. So I hope that helps.

Yeah, I love it. I love that anytime anybody drops a Jobs quote, quote, it resonates a lot. All right, Amit, who's a data engineer, is asking like, hey, like how do you kind of get started with a good idea? I have some thoughts on this, but Amit, love to get yours.

Sure, so I would say two things here or maybe three. First is if you remember at the beginning of this, at the beginning of this session, I said one thing, which is solve problems that you yourself have. It is impossible that you're a human being and don't have problems that someone's going to be willing to pay for. So I would say that, and it doesn't need to be tech, right? It could be where I don't have good bottles and you build a bottle company. Some of the richest and the best startups are non-tech, right? So I would say that's one. Two is if you yourself cannot find an idea even with all of that, feel free to go ahead and join someone that has a vision. Someone that has a strong vision and your job is to really make sure that vision is executed. So those are the two things that I would say is something that you should do.

Yeah, the only thing to add to that, FI has prepared a great resource around idea validation. So if you go to fi.co and you go to resources on the nav bar, you can click how to generate my first idea. We talk a lot about like doing a lot of customer discovery, customer interviews, going and seeking out problems out in the, with different audiences, and you're trying to identify a pattern there. That would be my suggestion is there, like, go talk to as many people within the same demographic to identify what that problem is. And like, if you talk to enough people, you'll probably see a pattern there. So that's typically your job to do as a founder, right? Just go ask a lot of questions within and be like, okay, what are the problems you're facing in your day-to-day? What's your workflow like? Do you feel like you're missing something in your day-to-day, right? Like it could be like a physical hardware thing, it could be a software thing, it could be whatever. So like I think regardless of your industry, you need to go out there and just talk to at least 100 or again, depending on your demographic and industry, you just need to go and talk to as many customers as possible, right? Absolutely. Cool. Let me refresh those. So Abdu— Abudi is asking, when should you actually start considering SEO? I think this is an interesting one.

So depends on who you are. So if you are able to write content, then I would say from day one. So SEO and outbound email are the two cheapest channels to acquire customers that are repeatable and sustainable. So if you are someone that is able to write content, then I would start doing it from day one. There are a couple of the pieces that you need. One is doing technical SEO. So making sure that your website is all sort of sorted. You can hire someone on Upwork to do that pretty quickly for you. And the second one is keyword research. Again, with keyword research, you can use your own brain to go ahead and do it or go hire someone on Upwork real quick as well to do that. So if you are able to generate content yourself or have someone on your team that can do it, I would say start from day one itself. It's going to pay off in spades in the long run.

Yeah, the only thing I'll add to that is go check out our previous— we had Boyan Market from Markelo come and give the audience a breakdown on everything they need to know about SEO. Again, fi.co/youtube, you can kind of go and look at our older— it's like from Jan. Just keep in mind, like, as you're thinking about this, you don't want to create content for things that, like, are still— for an idea that's not fully baked is the way I would see it, because you're going to go and spend all this time creating all this content, and if your idea changes or even has a pivot, like, then you have to create new content again. So to me, SEO and content marketing is maybe, like, the thing you do after you know that this is the idea you're going to double down on and and all of that type of stuff. And as Amit says, like once you start investing in that channel, it should become the cheapest one to start seeing return. You just have to plan it out properly. All right? Absolutely. Okay, awesome. So, this I find interesting, like how can you, like, I guess this would be like maybe services company or whichever, but like, when you don't have that portfolio and you're trying to, again, the trust factor and you're trying to go win some clients, like a lot of people might be like, okay, tell me how your product is used with your other clients or whichever, like how can you go and like navigate this question, right?

Yeah, absolutely. So go do stuff for free. That's what my recommendation would be and build out a case study, right? So quite literally we've done that several times. So I would just go ahead and do that.

Okay, that's it. That's it. I don't think I've heard anyone say that, just go do it for free. But that is a valid point. I think if you don't have any case studies, you need to be like, why? And to your point, there's a trust factor on it. But if you really are struggling, definitely go and like Amit said, do it for free for some people and build out those. I say it's case studies if you're services, use cases if you're software or hardware. Like, you need to tell me what do I use your product for, and you need to explain to me A to Z what the benefits are. You can't just tell me like, oh, it's gonna help me save time and a little bit of money. But like, in this day and age, like, we live in a saturated market for everything, so you need to tell me exactly how I can use your product or how your clients are using it so I can gain benefit, right? You really need to, and be as detailed as possible. Because you never know when you can leverage it again, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Awesome. So let's do one more question and then call it, and then we'll break out into networking. So we have 10 minutes of networking. I think you already mentioned this, but like Raja from Islamabad is asking like, what's the best way to reach out to big companies to sell them to B2B? I think maybe break down what does lead gen look like and what does sales look like? 'cause I think people get those two mixed up at the early stage. Maybe if you wanna dive deeper into that, that would be helpful.

Yeah, I mean to reach out to customers, again, I'm a big fan of outbound email and I think Ayaan is as well. So yeah, I mean cold email works and typically you reach out to a person and really showcase value and then you basically ask, hey, who's the right person within your org that I should talk to? The CEO will probably forward it to someone and you got an email forwarded from the CEO, you gotta look at it. I'd be like, all right, what is this going on? Let me at least check this thing out. So that works. Second, as I talked about conferences, conference is a great way. And the third one is going ahead and building out an audience. Those are the three things that I would really do.

Perfect. All right folks, we're hitting just towards the end. We wanna make sure that everyone has some time to network. Amit, thank you so much. Hopefully the audience got some value. I know we did, I think we did close to 20 questions. You're getting some hearts, some love. Folks, follow Amit on LinkedIn. He's a great person to know and like, we'll send out his LinkedIn profile, his deck out, and yeah, just kind of, we'll go from there. Stick around for the networking, but we're gonna wrap it up. Amit, any final words for the audience?

No, appreciate it. And along with LinkedIn, Twitter is a great way as well. It's @AmitM is my handle, so feel free to reach out. If I can help, quite literally send me a DM, more than happy to help anybody here. It looks like a lot of folks are here at the early stage, so more than happy to help out. Thanks guys for being here with us today.

Awesome. Thanks everyone. Hopefully you enjoy a good— I guess if you're starting out your Monday or if you're wrapping it up, hopefully this inspired you to go out there and do some more things. But yeah, let's end it there and then we'll see you in the networking session. Thanks everyone.

Bye guys.