Adam Schoenfeld
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adam: [00:00:00] we did so great in serving the customer and finding product market fit early but then all the challenges came in, and it was very messy and very hard, particularly because we were growing fast. So you know, I made a lot of bad decisions against my gut.

jeff: Welcome to Launch Pod, the show from Log Rocket, where we sit down with top product and digital leaders today. Our guest is Adam Schoenfeld, CEO and co-founder of Key Play a SaaS solution to help B2B marketers make their go to market more efficient in this episode. Adam talks about how he's taken three companies to over a million dollars in ARR, his process that's allowed him to reliably find product market fit again and again, and the critical mistakes he sees founders always make and how you can avoid them. So here's our episode with Adam Schoenfeld.



jeff: Hey, Adam, what's up, man? I'm really excited to have you on the show. I can't believe I've known you for as long as I have, but now we get to officially talk on the record. So how you doing?

adam: Oh my gosh. Putting the pressure on talking on the record. We've had a lot of good conversations over the years and neither of us have aged in the, I don't know, [00:01:00] six, seven, eight years we've known each other. So that's a nice little feature.

jeff: Yeah, I think we both look identical to the way we did and I think the 2017 we met. Bonus on us. Yeah. Although, I'm still shocked at how that has gone for you being that, you've what founded four companies, three have hit a million in ARR. I don't know, we might have to do a different episode on your secret to longevity.

But first I want to welcome you here and, excited to talk to you about key play and some of the other things you've launched over the years. 

adam: Absolutely.

jeff: We met, I think we met back in, in 2017 in a past role for me where we brought on your company Siftrock to do a very specific thing.

Yeah. And we, it worked great. You were acquired by drift at that point. And now you've spent some time on on key play and piercing. Oh, so for background, do you want maybe walk people through? You did not have a. Direct path in the key play. Let's say it was a little bit of circuitous to get in there.

So maybe you want to talk through that first journey and how that looked and how you got here,

adam: sure. Yeah, I'd love to. Cause I think it's a little bit non traditional. We [00:02:00] started with something called Pure Signal which was basically me writing content and analyzing what was going on in the SaaS industry. And then we use that as a way to both build an audience and discover what problem we wanted to solve and what product we wanted to build.

And that's what became Keyplay. And so we still run Pure Signal. We still have a big like content motion here. We still think a lot about building community and building our brand that way. Now we've been for two years out in market with the SAS product that came from that. So instead of, you know, identifying a customer problem and then going and solving that, we actually kind of reversed it where we went and engaged with a particular audience.

Knowing we wanted to start a company eventually, but it's like, let's go, let's go talk about, go to market. Let's go talk about a broad range of problems and then let's see what turns up. And that, that led us to finding this problem with key play, which is about helping companies model and their ICP and prioritize their target accounts.

[00:03:00] And I think that it's not for everybody, right? But I think it's a, it's a possible way into a market that you can pursue. 

jeff: \ ? how did you think through that decision to Start from the idea of this is the industry we want to go after , you basically built a business to learn about at first. So it's great. You almost I don't know how much revenue came off of Peer insight, but you almost monetized the actual discovery part of figuring out your company first.

adam: Yeah, yeah, very little revenue, but we did do a few little controlled experiments where we'd sell things and trying to test things along the way. I think a lot of times founding is very specific to the founders, like the path you take, like what's your circle of competence and where are you in your life and where are you in your career?

And so for me and Andrew, my co founder we knew that this was generally the space we wanted to go into because I had already started a couple. Companies in this space in broadly like sales and marketing tech. And so I was like, I want to go into a space where I. Have a, a good understanding of the dynamics and where it's in my [00:04:00] circle of competence.

And I think like the odds of success will be higher if I do that. And it's a passion of mine. So like we kind of drew that box even though we didn't know which particular problem that we wanted to solve. So I think that was the, the first framing. And then it was like, well, the two of us wanted to work together, Andrew and I, and we didn't wanna kind of just.

Go work in our day jobs forever. We wanted to like get going, like, you know, motion, motion creates emotion type thing, like, let's, let's get out there and start doing stuff. And so we, we started creating content. We put together these little data sets. So it's natural that we kind of, we got into a business that's very data heavy.

We put together these data sets to track SAS companies and what their go to markets were doing. Like, did they have a community? Were they doing PLG? What were their pricing strategies? And we. Collect all this data, make it available, and then do analysis and share our learnings. And so that kind of got the flywheel going of, you know, sharing this stuff and people would come back to us and we'd have conversations and then people would see what we were [00:05:00] doing and start to ask us, Oh, could you do something like that?

But for my problem over here, so it just, it started creating this really interesting process of building an audience. And then from that audience, you know, discovering problems that we might want to go solve.

jeff: Did it come from the idea for key play come from discussions you had bringing this information forward, or was it insights you gleaned when you were analyzing company sets and stuff like that

adam: It was a kind of a combination. No, it's hard to go back and pull one exact thread, but I do remember one. Exactly. Exactly. And founders love doing that. We're, we're the best at that.

jeff: it's a straight line from, starting to success, no bumps. It was wonderful.

adam: this vision and then I hit a hundred million of ARR and, you know, all these things. Remember there was one email that we got, and it was from a guy named Ryan Narod at Mutiny. He was at Mutiny at the time, head of marketing there. And he said, Hey, I was looking at your, you know, SAS index that you put together.

At Mutiny, we sell to companies. A lot of the companies [00:06:00] we sell to are on that list, but we have slightly different way that we would want to build our target market. Is there something custom you could do kind of like this, but for us, and we're like, Hey, but don't you have six cents and zoom info and all these other tools to do that?

And he's like, ah, we've tried, you know? So So that email really kicked off a big aha for us, which was that there was still an unsolved problem in that whole world of figuring out who's your ICP and how to put together that, that list of accounts. So there was that point and then we had like little inklings kind of around that, that were coming in.

So I think a lot of the inbound emails were actually the biggest source of product inspiration for us.

jeff: Interesting. yeah, I think if you look at. Product folks in general, right? A lot of kind of the inspiration for a product or whether you are founding a company or building a product internally to a company is you talk to users, you talk to prospective users, understand problem and build around that.

You just took a very unique way of getting there.

adam: Right. [00:07:00] We kind of let those users come to us. And with their problems, then we sort of sorted through the ones that were, were they interesting for us? Did it kind of fit with something we thought we could do? Did it sort of fit with how we saw the market? So, and then once we had one of those or two of those, you know, then we actually went to Ryan at one point and we said, Hey, would you pay us for six months?

To work on that and like, we'll, we'll, we'll really be scrappy. Like we're, we had an air table that was the deliverable. We wrote some scripts behind the scenes. Like there was no SAS app, but we did a very scrappy version. We got paid for a six month engagement on that. And then at that point we put up kind of like a page on peer signal that said, I'm sure the messaging was terrible, but it kind of described like, if you have this shape problem, click here and email us.

And we got a few more from that. And then that was how the design partner program started.

jeff: I think probably everyone who's been around long enough has seen, there's been multiple times where we've tried, let's throw up the raw idea of the thing. And it's really funny cause [00:08:00] it seems like such a basic test. Let's just. Put this basic offer up. It won't be super acute.

It won't be super well detailed. Probably like you said, the messaging's off, but I feel like that is such a good bellwether test because if you have to force it, if you're not getting a pretty quick, decent response, I don't know, it feels like high likelihood that maybe you're going to just be shouting into the abyss.

But if you get people jumping into it and just pushing and going. , you still work to do, but you probably have a much easier, more doable job on your hands. Is that kind of how you guys looked at it

adam: I totally agree with that. I think you're totally on with it because you want people that are in such acute pain on something that even if your messaging is terrible, even if you don't really have a product, if they're willing to raise their hand and say, yeah, I need that solved. And I think that that helps you find that and match to those people.

And it doesn't mean your whole market will have that kind of acute pain, but if, if nobody has it. And nobody can kind of see through your weak messaging and your terrible UI or [00:09:00] whatever, whatever your V zero is, then I think that's a problem.

jeff: If you have a few people who can see through and get the I see the vision, I need that with base level kind of no iteration work, then you probably can go a lot further with more. It's funny. I remember Years and years ago before COVID outside of tech, I ran a festival company that basically ran beer and food festivals.

It was a lot of fun, actually. It was a fun hobby that kind of got out of hand. But we were putting on events and we had a huge following. We had lucked into social at the right time. We built a gigantic social media following and we couldn't convert it into anything beyond like we were. inching along at barely break even revenue.

I think we, lose money. Some quarters make it a little bit the following quarter and we were on life support and we looked at it and said, we're just doing nothing different. , it shouldn't be this hard. And then we had this kind of idea to shift a little bit about how we're going, like you said, kind of base zero messaging.

We said what's different. We like cheese too. Let's see if people respond to us focusing the event on [00:10:00] food pairing with beer and we're gonna add just local cheese into it And it was one of those things just so binary took off that you went like God, how did I miss this for so long? What have I been thinking doing this?

you know trying to do this without this and it just we started to sell out months in advance and it became this easy walk in the park and we had hardship afterwards still but seeing it was like very base level, emotional level understanding that I received over time of this is what product market fit looks like.

And it's not always easy, but it's doable. 

adam: I think it's so much of that and getting to product market fit. I mean, I think I've done this three times. I've done four companies, one that totally failed in three that have, you know, that crossed a million of ARR and one that's still going. And

jeff: a good rate, by the way. That's pretty good.

adam: one that got, got to 10 past 10, but you know, this one will just give us some time.

jeff: I have no think there's so much of that, just the product market fit doesn't show up on the spreadsheet. Like it, it is this emotional thing. It is this kind of human thing that you have to like, try to read the body language and how are they leaning [00:11:00] in? What are they saying? Kind of between the lines. And you know, it's interesting in your, your finding the cheese thing, right?

adam: Because you knew you didn't have it before.

jeff: right.

adam: Right. You're like, you could just tell, and like, you know, when you have it and you know what you don't, which is what's so infuriating about it, but it's so hard to put your finger on.

jeff: Yeah, we could see, you sit there and we're like, this is halfway there. People come, we make, we inch along, but this is a hobby right now, not a business. If you, if the IRS ever were to come to us, it's I don't know if you really can call it as a business guys.

But yeah, once you hit that point, that's really interesting that you guys saw that more from the, throughout the landing page, see if anyone bites and if they see through it, if a few people, you can walk into a semi easy deal. You got something and you guys went to the design partner level this.

So tell us about that. Like, how'd you construct that was the path forward?

adam: , I mentioned Ryan was the first one to buy and we're like, pay us. I think it was eight or 10 K for six months because we kind of, we knew enough. We kind of envisioned this being sort of like a 20 to 50 K ACV product, sort [00:12:00] of at steady state. Like if we, if we took to the logical extreme, like we solved this problem really well and we have a solution we can deliver repeatedly, that's what we thought.

So we're like, okay, let's start sort of in the lower end of that. Let's start with like lower the bar on commitment, but we wanted some. Commercial aspect to it. I think some people will do design partners where you're literally just building around them and trying to solve the problem for them and not collecting any money, or maybe you have an LOI for some future thing for us.

It was paramount to have a give money in exchange for doing that. And that's, I think a choice you can go either way on. But for me, that was like really important. Cause I. I wasn't confident without that, that they were really voting that this was a need. So we did those, these like six month scrappy.

It was like air table plus a little bit of Adam as a service. Plus Andrew would kind of be like whipping up different scripts and we're kind of building the backend, like as we were doing these. And, and so again, just like the messaging was Very rough what we were delivering as a [00:13:00] product was really rough, but we were able to like, I think with having our hands on the keyword and being very white glove, like deliver a solution to the stated problem and just learn a ton.

So we, we, I think by the time we ended up building the full app, we had about seven or eight of those design partners and we had started converting them to annuals and we had started like. Showing them, Hey, this is what the product's going to be. So that was really like maybe phase two, if phase one was kind of discovering the problem, then phase two is okay, this is the problem we're going to solve, let's get some people signed up to like work with us on that.

jeff: Can you get people paying you for it and really on the standard SAS annual agreement? , it's really funny that you bring up, like it was all air table and pieced together because I think a lot of people miss that you don't. Need the shiny, MVP doesn't just mean like minimal viable kind of crappy It means you need to give the experience, but you don't need the slick ui Maybe it means you need to deliver the value and check if that is something like you said, people paying for it if you get people paying for it doesn't [00:14:00] have to be like you guys have a great ui now I actively enjoy using the product.

But you don't need that early on. It reminds me early on. So we've spent, I don't know. What is it? Five years now, six years, six years before I got here, investing in kind of AI because our, separately our thesis around kind of session replan analytics was there's a lot of data there.

It's how do you speed up insights and how do you get You know, more actionable stuff out of it without having to sit there and watch, 100, 000 sessions or

adam: you.

jeff: stupid. And I remember very early on when I got here, we went over to one of our customers and we showed them like the earliest iteration of what has become our AI solutions. And we basically had a spreadsheet that listed several sessions that we were able to surface that showed real user problems that were affecting the business.

Like they, they sold travel tours and they monetized a lot around add ons after the initial purchase. And basically one of the things we surfaced and we were in a meeting with five or 6 PMs business leaders and we went through and they're like, yeah, we know about that problem. Oh, we know about that problem.

But like, how do you guys know about that problem? And it was, we were able to [00:15:00] surface it very quickly through the AI. And then finally, one of them we hit one out of five that we showed them. They just went, Oh my God, this, hold on a minute, stop. And two people ran out of the room and they ran back in with the eight more people

And we're like, oh, so you'd pay for this, huh? Like we have been investing in this for two months. It has cost us so much money. You just solved it for us. Oh my God. And like full stop. So that was the kind of light bulb, let's invest more here and let's build up the UI and, really ram it home.

But it is great to 

see those kinds of early traction moments. .

adam: Those moments are so great. And they're so fleeting. I mean, they're so hard and you have so many that aren't like that to get the few that are absolutely love that. I mean, if you can get that kind of response, you, you really know you're onto something, even in a small number, because there's gotta be more people that would have that response, right?

Like when you have one.

jeff: like early on, you don't need, I think the Mr. People, you don't need everyone to buy your software. You need what? You need to get like 10 million, then you need to get to 10 and then, you need to figure out where you go from there maybe, but it's, you can build tight first.

And it seems [00:16:00] like you guys had this great thesis of, let's go talk to the market. Let's find a way to do it as a business almost, and then build a product on top of that. And then you said the design piece and you iterated. It's just like each step you're moving closer and closer at learning more and getting wider.

So now you have design partners delivering the value and you're testing it works because people are paying you for this. So where did it go from there? I assume they, they kept paying you some of them and you were able to

sign them on. 

adam: Most of them, most of them stuck around, you know, and kind of stuck on for an annual

jeff: Which is good signal.

adam: the product. Yeah, that was good. And, you know, then we started got to the work of actually building what would be a solution that we could sell to more of the fatter part of the market, right?

Because we had these like People who are in acute pain, innovators, like if you're a Jeffrey Moore fan, right? Like the very beginning of that curve, not, not even close to the chasm, but way left. You know, the, the innovators within the innovators probably were those first six or eight customers. And then it was like, okay, we got to kind of move ourselves [00:17:00] to.

The things that are going to make it actually sellable and usable for people who, you know, need normal stuff like integrations to the CRM. Right. I mean, we're doing stuff with accounts. How could we not talk back and forth with the CRM? Right. So that, that was like those kinds of things started to get, you know, the, the UI for how do you like find new accounts and pull them in.

So we just started to think through all the workflows and what was nice is , having done it in a combination of Airtable plus like just. , we really understood the workflow pretty well. And I think our V ones on a lot of this stuff, like have stuck around two years later, I think there's some that we didn't get right for sure.

But I think that helped because we were so deep into those design partner. engagements for six, seven months that we had a good sense of like, okay, how can we prioritize the actual features now that we need to go build to make this more sellable?

jeff: And so from there you found a nice way to get a product market fit and now you're sitting here and I assume from there you've just, straight line, we talked about it's founding to straight line to what [00:18:00] IPO in a couple of years, 

adam: I, in like five and five years or so, that's what I want to just tell you. And when I come on the podcast again, but you know, it wasn't actually, so the design part of the thing went really well. Cause People were paying, they were seeing value, the qualitative responses were really good. They were saying they wanted to buy it and renew once we had the product built out, you know?

And but then we, you know, came to market. So then it's like, okay, introducing Keyplay. In fact, many of those design partners, we didn't have the name figured out. So then it's like, okay, we're introducing Keyplay. We had raised money basically on the backs of some successful design partners and repeat founder.

So we'd raise the seed and we go and we announced that we exist and we kind of tell our story and we show our product, you know, all the things you do. You get a website, you get a nice little demo video, you have a form where they can come request a demo. At least in our world, we're more of a sales led model than a, a self serve.

And to be honest, those first two quarters, we did, we thought things were just gonna kind of. You know, accelerate. And it was, it was a lot of grinding. We were, we were [00:19:00] adding customers, the design partner thing, maybe tricked us a little bit because they had people had bought so quickly and we're so active, but then we got out there and it was just like, we didn't quite have it locked into gear.

And I think there was some macro issues going on right then. This is, remember, this is the very start of 2023.

jeff: Yeah, not a great time to be founding a sass company.

adam: I mean, SAS budgets just kind of went right down everything's getting a lot of scrutiny, but I think there were also just, we had maybe, oh, underestimated the strength of the competitors, underestimated how many existing tools people had that we had to position around underestimated maybe that.

The number of features that we needed to sort of land to go from customer 10 to customer 50, you know, and that was a great, that was great learning because it sort of was a little humble pie at that moment to really like force us to, you know, focus on those fundamental questions and make sure we were sharpening them and, and not weren't allowed to get ahead of ourselves.[00:20:00] 

jeff: right. Not to be, trite, but like it takes friction to sharpen a knife, right? You don't do that on a smooth towel, you do on a whetstone But it's funny because I remember like I said, we've known each other for a long time now. And you built this audience, , of, marketing leaders very early on.

I remember you coming and talking to a CMOs group I was in and all sorts of stuff. But you built the audience and you were talking publicly a lot about this stuff. And I think it's one thing that maybe founders. And product people who are launching new products miss is that a lot of these things that look like they just went smoothly up into the right.

You don't see the friction behind, the curtain there. Because by all intents and purposes, it looked like you guys were killing it from the outset. Like everything I saw people talking about you. I saw you, getting huge traction talking on LinkedIn and everywhere. Hopefully some people can take away from this that a little heartening that they're not the only ones to struggle right when they launch to try and scale.

It's even people who appear really successful. It can be a little hard,

adam: Yeah, I think you can stub your [00:21:00] toe or slip it like any of those little mini moments, phase shifts, right from like exploration to design partner to launch to initial scale to, you know, next scale. Like Things change and you have to like continually adapt. And I think we probably had set the expectations really high to out of the gate and then they were okay.

Like we were bringing in new customers. So just, you know, it wasn't crickets, but it wasn't like, it didn't just fly off the shelves that those first couple of quarters. And, and then I think it started to. Lock into gear and we started to like adjust, you know, especially, honestly, I think a lot was like related to how our sales process worked given the dynamics of our space.

Like, I think we had sort of underestimated the burden of proof we would need to show during the process. So we got a lot tighter in, you know, the inner workings between product and go to market, I think was where a lot of the breakthroughs came.

jeff: Yeah. It's just I'm curious to dig into [00:22:00] like where. What do you think led to some of that early friction? Cause we had a guy named Sean Lorenz on a couple episodes ago and he talked about, one of the big things we pulled away from that was it's not just about the right product, but it's about channel market fit.

And it's about not, you might have a great vision for where you're going to be, but not selling too far down your roadmap because then people are like I don't want what's now I want what you said you're going to have in a year. Do you, have you identified like what some of those, Problems might have been, or how people might look at, avoiding that or lessons to be taken away, or is it just a matter of you're gonna run into some kind of friction and you gotta it's gonna be, company dependent on what, what happens and you just gotta figure it out,

adam: I think it's company independent for us. I think it was a combination of the macro change. And then just the particular competitive dynamics that we were in and how much kind of proof we had to show to earn a place in the stack. And those things like fed each other big time. Because if the CFO says, Hey, your budget for MarTech is like now half or whatever, they cut it by.

And you have other vendors that you're sort of trying [00:23:00] to figure out an approach to. Like I, we, we talked recently and I saw, you know, you have several vendors in this general space that we're in. Right. And so everybody had to, has to kind of think about like, if you're doing ABM or you're going up market, what, how are you going to put those pieces together?

And I think we hadn't just figured out how to show. And prove that we had this like important piece of the puzzle that was going to be a game changer versus the way that they might be doing it, like by stitching together other tools or some manual work,

jeff: No, that makes sense. I might be slightly difficult as a marketing person to sell to as well, because I hold a general thesis that like marketing. Tools or marketing tactics tend to over time asymptote in effectiveness. And so by the time you've, built the really big platform that does everything, likelihood is a lot of people are using that.

And that's how you've gotten to that point. And now that tactic probably is a little bit less effective. So I tend to be someone who looks at how do we build our own things internally and leverage, solutions where we can, and, but there's always some kind of custom [00:24:00] stuff. But I do think there are certain things that just make fundamental sense.

And one is, in this case, knowing who you sell to and having a great grasp and actionable knowledge of who that is. That seems a lot, very durable it's a cool thing there. Back to, you said you launched into, this post desert world where everyone's much tighter with budgets.

Do you, I'm sure that hurt for a second there, but do you think generally that maybe helped as well because you publicly have this thesis on just how go to market has changed and the, spray and pray of the teens doesn't really work anymore. Do you think that combined where maybe it hurt for a second to launch into post there, but in reality, this reality is.

Yeah.

adam: do, I think it's way healthier overall, probably this, I mean, the correction hurts, but I think the, the new normal is probably better than the, the crazy growth at all costs era, just in terms of sustainability of businesses and people's jobs and like how, how we go from here, I think is probably better.

But [00:25:00] of course these like. When you have to snap back to something, it, it, it can be painful. And yes, for us, it's a bit of a double edged sword , or there's two sides to the coin, maybe is a better way of saying it, which is the, the fact that there's more scrutiny. For our customers means they need to do the job that we help them solve better and better, which is like they need to pick the right accounts to target.

And it's just if you're doing spray and pray and you have a lot of money to spend, you don't really care about how effective your marketing and sales dollars are. You can just gloss over a little bit more, but if you're putting scrutiny on that and you want to have rigor and precision, then the problem we solve becomes more important.

So yes, I think we're probably beneficiaries of it to some extent, but it, it's, it's got two sides to it for sure.

jeff: Yeah. No. And maybe it's just helpful to hit on a quick second of, , what's the basis for kind of your thesis here on the market and why did this change and what's important now? What doesn't work anymore that people may be used to do?

adam: Well, if I think of the, the way it's gone [00:26:00] historically, right, there was a big wave of just get online. And I think that was like, you know, get a website, start doing email, start doing all these things. And then the next logical thing was like, Do more volume, do more activity, right?

Just crank, right? More ads, more clicks, more emails. Right. And I think we went through a lot of that and. I think what's happened is the return on that on each incremental email or activity is goes down when that happens because buyers are flooded. And so then it's like, well, what's the only next thing you can do is you can get more focused and you can like.

pick who are going to be the best buyers for you. And then you can, you can focus your resources on those folks. And I like this idea of like surround sound, like creating a surround sound effect within a smaller room. And that's where I think you can have more results per every like unit of input. And you can channel your creative energy because you're thinking more carefully about.

These are the people in the segments and the types of companies that we want to serve. And so I think [00:27:00] it can actually unlock you creatively and you can come up with better ideas and you can create better content. So I think it's like this whole mindset shift. That's kind of, I'm seeing happening and I think it's just like this natural evolution of, you know, being in this digital world where, where activity can just kind of go to infinity.

And, and now I think we're, we're questioning that and I'm thinking about like other ways to go about it.

jeff: I think the parallel to the concept of infinity is actually a really interesting one because like in the late aughts, I joined a company. It was a really early stage startup and is now a multi billion dollar public company. And they've been eminently successful and We built the go to market on the back of, what was then innovatively called email nurture, right?

I think now we call it email spam. But we just, it was that thing like, Oh, we can just go buy more, go do more emails and more, buy more leads and send more emails. And it worked linearly, but it worked because not everyone, very few people were doing it. But the concept of infinity starts to [00:28:00] happen where like at some point you just hit a volume of this noise in your inbox in this case where It doesn't matter if 20 more companies start spending a lot more email to me It becomes I don't notice because I just don't even pay attention to my email anymore.

And how do you get around that is, like you said, it's, you get more picky with it and you'd be aware of who actually could benefit who your best buyers and how do you reach them in a new, authentic way. Not always a topic for product people, I don't think, but something to keep in mind is if you are launching a product, how you communicate and how you drive to go to market is a huge part of product success.

It's not just build the product and they'll come. As you found out, right? It's, you have to go figure out how to get there too.

adam: Yeah, well, I think, the best companies, they figure out how to make those things work together. Right? Like the, the product and the go to market are, are one unified thing. They're not this disconnected, like, Hey, okay, we've got a good product.

Now let's go add some sales and marketing.

jeff: right. Now let's go add. Let's go bolt on go to market to it. Like you have to think about how all this stuff in congruence. All right let's [00:29:00] go on a trip for a second, Adam. Let's go all the way back to, the same time I'm talking about here. But you founded another of your companies that made it to a million ARR.

And simply measured. But you basically went on, but on the back of that, you ended up on the board of a company called visible, which I think is one of these early on companies that did focus on how do you get a little bit more accurate about the stuff? How do you focus a little bit deeper?

But you talked about, your role there was to basically help the founder with cautionary tales of what you experienced and that maybe the experience was even a little painful for you. But I guess what were these insights you brought forward? I don't mean to, rip the scab off old wounds here, but 

adam: you can do it, Jeff. It's fine. 

jeff: I appreciate Adam.

adam: Well, the story of Simply Measured is, is a really interesting one. I could probably like write a lot of chapters of a book on it. We were, the three founders were really young when we started it. And we came into a big wave within what was happening in social media and like.

2010. Obviously like I think Twitter had been around for a few years and Facebook and all those things, but companies were starting to get into it and we built an analytics product for [00:30:00] social media, particularly for organic social media. And we just, we flew, I mean, , we went from one to 5 million, I think in like 15 months, it was a little slower getting to 1 million, but once we caught that wave, we were flying and you know, we raised a lot of money and around 10, it started to get harder and, you know, we sort of.

Ended up sort of around 20, but that 10 to 20, we hit a lot of problems. And I think a lot of it was, I was a young founder. I didn't really know how to scale teams. I took a lot of bad advice. I didn't trust my gut. There was just a lot of like things that I did as we started to grow that I hope I get another chance at key play to achieve those.

Levels of scale so that I can try again. But it's, it's interesting because we, we did so great in like serving the customer and finding product market fit early and getting it out there, getting a great brand. We had hundreds of thousands of free users, all this stuff. But then all the challenges came in, how do you grow the executive team?

And how are we going to like scale the company and the culture? And, you know, how are we going to [00:31:00] figure it out? How to make this company work at that scale and deliver to it was, and it was very messy and very hard, particularly because we were growing fast. So you know, I made a lot of mishires. I made a lot of bad decisions, you know, against my gut.

I distanced my relationship with my co founders. I probably, I could give you a checklist of things not to do. I think when I came on the board at Visible, I can maybe helped Aaron, he already was a better tuned than I was but I maybe could help with you know, avoiding some of those things as they were, you know, scaling through those different levels.

jeff: right. Yeah. And that's, at heart, if you're building a company or you're building, there's a new product, like we've talked about, it's a lot of these problems come up of I feel product people, especially product leaders, it's not just the product.

It's everything around it. You need to be thinking about how do you interact with engineering with the exec team with marketing, with sales. So a lot of these lessons stay the same of, you want to, I think it is important to listen to your gut. You mentioned the last one in passing, but there's been a lot of decisions where at heart, when I look back at some of the biggest.[00:32:00] 

Problems I've run into has been places where I did what maybe was the academically correct thing, or, the thing that like was generally like, Oh yeah, this is just what you do at this point. But looking back, I was always uncomfortable with it. And then I realized that's the thing that bit me in the ass.

adam: that's right. That's generally my advice to founders, especially younger founders. Like I was then it's like, tune into your intuition. If you got to that level, if you built a business to that point, you probably understand something about your market and your, your product and your customer and your particular business.

And I think I tried to take, yeah, the academic answer, the conventional answer. And apply it instead of like thinking through it and checking with what fit my values. And also like I, I, I drifted from my co founders in that where the earlier days, the three of us were really good at going through those discussions together, which is a big lesson.

I applied it at Siftrock and now at Keyplay is like being, just being in lockstep with the co founders the whole way, like every problem, everything that's good, we're, we're [00:33:00] locked and loaded.

jeff: What's a couple months back we had a non you on, he's the head of product over at linear. And he had a great point on this, which was basically, at times you have to have an opinion. You're not, you're building a startup, right? You're building something new and you are trying to drive probably like asymmetric value or not asymmetric, but you're trying to drive, huge amounts of value very quickly.

And you're not going to do that. If you just take a kind of, portfolio management approach or an index fund approach, you probably have to take some risk. And part of that's going to be, if you just do the academically correct answer, every time you're going to get the average. So at times it pays off to my intuition is that this is actually different than what everyone says we're going to do this.

And, I guess the trick is, find how to either get signal really fast that you're wrong, fail quickly, fail extreme and just get out and do something new or find that you were more right than in the past. And you now have an advantage. 

adam: A tough balance because you want to be grounded on the truth of the market, but you also want to like follow your [00:34:00] intuition. I think it's just like you're constantly kind of checking in with where you are in that and making sure you're not, you know, overdoing it. Like your gut can be wrong

jeff: right.

adam: so I struggle with it to this day, but I 

jeff: If you find yourself doing that all the time, be careful like,

Okay, let's come back to today. Now you as we've talked about, you've now founded four companies, three of which have hit a million ARR I think some of them could have even gone farther, but you ended up you're in one now and, one, you sold to a pretty successful company.

I guess the question people are going to be asking is like, what is the secret here? What's the secret to finding product market fit? What's your little silver bullet unlock here that you can tell us all that will make us all magically successful.

adam: You know, no silver bullets, as you know, actually, I worked for a guy named David can sell it at drift and he used to say that all the time about no, no silver bullets. I think, I think in some of the Buffett and Munger books, there's a lot of stuff about that, you know, just getting a 1 percent better every day.

I think the, probably the [00:35:00] main thing in my experience of going, you know, getting product market fit, getting to like a million of AR, if that's sort of how you think of product market fit, maybe it's earlier in some businesses is to really early on, like get as much clarity as you can about who that customer is.

You know, and who do you seek to serve and, and what's the problem? I mean, just those fundamentals. Like, I don't think there's a bunch of fanciness to it. There's Charlie Munger has a quote about you want to sell something that you would buy if you were on the other side.

jeff: Yeah.

adam: And I think about that quote all the time because I just want to calibrate with my gut.

If this is feeling like. We're bringing something forward that's making a difference. And I think if, if you're really grounded on that, and I think that's, that's the key to the whole thing. I, I think it's like, it's shockingly simple, but it's hard.

jeff: How do you find, how do you find your cheese, right? How do you find the service that Mutiny needs? And then it turns out [00:36:00] six more people need it. And a hundred more people. How do you find the thing that people are going to take your crappy messaging or your unbaked messaging and see through it to the real vision?

And , there's no easy unlock there. I think you had a cool tactic with PeerSignal, right? Going to go in, build something that's going to build you a community. So you can just talk to a ton of knowledgeable people who you want to sell to, it also builds in distribute.

Did you find that was helpful in distribution at all? The

adam: Oh, a hundred percent. Yes.

jeff: you had an inroad already to these people.

adam: Yeah. We, you know, we had 10, 000 email subscribers when we launched or something like that.

jeff: Yeah. Nice so I think last topic I want to cover we've alluded to sifrock you, you know That was how we met actually is I had this very particular problem at my last company that I was trying to figure out how to solve and you guys had the exact product that did exactly what I needed it was fantastic and I stumbled upon it.

I don't even remember how You guys ended up taking it, you know so far and then you got acquired by drift and this is, this is when drift was the hotness in Boston. That was like the startup you wanted to be at. But what is that like on the other side? Like being [00:37:00] acquired by a company that has that kind of like momentum and that size and you're a couple of people, is there any kind of takeaways to how maybe, founders or product people can approach that?

And D risk it,

adam: Yeah. There's a lot. I think that there's, you know, should you do the transaction and what that looks like, then there's kind of what happens after I think when you're evaluating it, it's. A lot of, I think a lot of people miss this sort of non financial parts of the decision. Like what's my life going to look like after and how's that different?

And how's this going to change how I sort of think about my identity? Because for a lot of us, you're like, I'm a founder and this is like an important identity thing. Right. And so you, there's a lot of change that, that happens after that. So that I think people sometimes gloss over because they're sort of focused on what's the number, what are the deal mechanics?

What are the economics here? What's my earn out? Like. Which is all important. But I, I do think there's, there's another side of that to think about. And then after you get into these things you know, it's super interesting. We were acquired by, like you said they were a startup, but they were much bigger.

They had, you know, several hundred [00:38:00] people. We were five people, we were a little profitable bootstrap thing, right. That they plugged in and. They were flying and it's, there's a lot to manage. Like, as you come into those to like educate everybody on like, Oh, what is this new product that we bought do?

And who are these people? And I don't, I'm sure I didn't get it right. But I think there's a lot of like, that works really important. I think if you want that thing to work out, it's like making sure people know what it is and the sales people know how to sell it and you know, the better together story, and I think that's like a, I think an important thing to sign up for probably if you're a, if you're a founder and executive coming across with the deal.

Is to think about that stuff and maybe even during the deal process, like talk about how that's going to look. I'm not sure I asked all those questions up front, but we did. That was, I think, maybe surprising or new for me to navigate some of those things.

jeff: Yeah. In theory, hopefully given the trajectory of key play, something you won't have to think about cause you're just IPO and, ride off into the sunset and go 

adam: to run 

jeff: your private Island. Yeah, no, it's a great company. I don't want to take your whole day. I'm sure, [00:39:00] you're, you got a lot going on with growing, a company at that level.

I'll let you go, but I really appreciate you coming on today. I was fantastic like to catch up and I know we've known each other for a while, but I haven't gotten to dig in and learn all this stuff 

And if people are looking to reach out, you can't be missed on LinkedIn.

So if people want to, congratulate your, or find out more or even ask questions you're all over the place on LinkedIn. So I assume that's possibly a good channel.

adam: LinkedIn's my main place. If you do connect with me, you'll be subjected to my musings. So, be warned.

jeff: I highly recommend it. But thanks, man. I appreciate you coming on and yeah, hopefully we can catch up again soon.

adam: Great to see you, Jeff. Thanks for