Transcript excerpt from a discussion about how Wiz’s founders generated early customer demand organically by leveraging their professional networks, soliciting feedback from practitioners, iterating the product over ~12 months, and prioritizing listening over pitching. The founders used direct outreach and demos to convert conversations into a pool of demand while evolving the product based on learning.
Where was this demand coming from?
It was very organic and it's a credit to the approach our founders took, right, like as, as practitioners, prior to like. So they, they took this approach of let's go show other like minded practitioners who are dealing with this set of challenges what we're up to and get feedback and iterate. And so they built this enterprise class ready to go out of the box solution as a result of collecting and applying feedback over a period of, you know, 12 months. And so the initial direction of the company and the product is very different than what Wiz is today. And I think it's a testament to not only our co founders, but a corporate philosophy of we should always be listening first and asking questions more than speaking. And so when I saw the initial demand, some of it was misunderstood, some of it was dated because the conversation had transpired months prior and they weren't actually aware of what we were doing now or how we had evolved. But I think just through network and interaction and asking really thoughtful questions, we were able to create a pool of demand through our network just, just sitting down and calling people that we worked with or we knew or whatever and just saying, hey, let us show you what we're up to, let us try to explain it and then hopefully you can help it make us better.
Again. This theme of leveraging network, it sounds like that was done at the founder level when it comes to demand gen customer acquisition. Generating calls to learn about problems that potential customers were facing and then founders would go back and design the solution over time based off of what they would learn.
