How To Find Early Adopters For Your B2B SaaS
Episode Stats
Words per minute
171.00557
Summary
In this episode of the Startup Spotlight podcast, I have a chat with Luca Barbu, CEO and Founder of Cruise, a carpooling service that helps employees get home after work. We talk about the business model, how to get companies on board, and how to find early adopters.
Transcript
00:00:00.080
what would tell you looking from outside maybe through a website maybe looking at a building
00:00:06.480
maybe where they're located that would tell you that they would care about carbon offsets
00:00:11.760
their CSR strategies and their CSR projects. Yeah. All right. You're a smart cat.
00:00:30.860
Luca, how's it going, man? All good. All good. Great. Very cool. Last time. Yeah. All right.
00:00:38.740
well let's let's talk business tell me about your business and we'll get in some questions
00:00:43.380
let's sure so uh for short our business is called cruise and we connect employees
00:00:49.940
from the same company to go home or to work together uber but like for employees inside the
00:00:57.060
company right so it's carpooling for employees yeah that's right we sell it uh to the company
00:01:05.460
uh the ride is free for the user only the company pays and the main differentiators
00:01:11.300
are that we track the carbon footprint that you reduce and we're also tracking um and offering
00:01:19.060
benefits to the to the drivers and to the passengers so it's like a uh gamified system
00:01:25.540
for them all right did you know that uh lyft started off as this before they became lyft
00:01:32.420
i heard about it yeah yeah yeah yeah that's cool um i got the the premise where are you at what
00:01:38.980
stage are you at so right now we're in development um our business is is like we're starting to put
00:01:45.860
together uh the ui ux uh we're starting these to integrate our interviews our qualitative
00:01:52.660
our quantitative we started putting them together uh and right now we've just received an investment
00:01:58.660
from shark tank romania and we're using that to finish up development uh there's a shark tank
00:02:05.300
in romania yeah it's actually it's called lion's empire oh okay but it's not the shark tank
00:02:12.420
producers it's a separate producer it's it's the show licensed here in romania okay because we have
00:02:18.500
dragon's den in canada same concept yeah same concept cool so you went on the show and you got
00:02:24.500
investment yes yeah awesome so how can i help so right now uh we have we have like three main uh
00:02:34.020
things that we're struggling with um is first signing clients before we launch so for us it's
00:02:40.820
very important to uh to have somebody on board because it's easier to convince others we can go
00:02:45.700
hey look this corporate entity this company signed up for us why don't you as well and
00:02:51.300
that moves it out uh in the in the sales process but it's hard for us to convince before we even
00:02:59.380
have a demo or a product to okay that footing so it sounds like your challenge is trying to get
00:03:07.860
a company to take a bet on you when you don't have the demo bill yet yes so here's here's a
00:03:14.500
important concept that i think um you know it's been written about a lot but it's the idea of the
00:03:19.940
the technology adoption curve right so jeffrey moore um wrote a book and he drew this curve and
00:03:28.020
essentially in it there's five stages of technology adoption and i think it's like um majority yeah
00:03:37.540
the innovators uh early adopters then there's there's even one before i think but there's i
00:03:43.940
i think there's five uh and then there's like the laggards right so the way i think about it is if
00:03:51.380
you have a product that has demand right like there's some kind of thing but but most things
00:03:56.100
that are crazy like you know like super specific innovation should have a market right but even in
00:04:03.460
that market that total addressable market there's essentially these early adopters yeah so then the
00:04:09.860
question is in romania i'm assuming is it romania you're trying to get some companies on board yeah
00:04:15.780
in romania and then there's also for you kind of a a company size that needs to be big enough for
00:04:22.660
it to really work so what's the minimum amount of employees you think it requires 600. okay so in
00:04:28.660
romania you need to find companies that have 600 employees or more um that care about the things
00:04:36.900
that you saw because it sounds like the employees get to use it for free which is fine they would
00:04:42.100
use it for free but the company is going to pay so they need to want it and they need to care
00:04:47.940
about the things they built in it which is the carbon offset so then the question to you is
00:04:53.940
and everybody listening is what would tell you looking from outside maybe through a website
00:05:01.300
maybe looking at a building maybe where they're located that would tell you that they would care
00:05:06.340
about carbon offsets their csr uh strategies and their csr projects yeah all right you're a smart
00:05:13.860
cat because i i've actually had this conversation quite a bit with entrepreneurs um so if i go to
00:05:18.980
their website and if i find that they have a csr component then that tells me they're at least
00:05:23.620
in market now does having a csr component tell me they're an early adopter no not even perfect
00:05:30.660
so at least tells me they're qualified for what i'm doing or they're at least a target
00:05:35.300
Then I need to find out what makes them an early adopter.
00:05:38.100
So my question to you is what is true about a 600 person company
00:05:42.740
that would tell you they're also early adopters of technology?
00:05:47.060
I think at least for us, we don't try to perceive it as a
00:05:54.380
as a technology bit, you know, as they are early adopters of technology
00:05:58.100
as much as there are early adopters of a subscription.
00:06:00.580
So we have this thing here in Romania, which is called seven card subscription to gyms.
00:06:05.300
right but to all gyms in different of what kind of a chain that part they're a part of so that
00:06:10.980
became sort of like you know it is not adoption of technology but adoption of this trend of
00:06:16.100
oh you got a seven card i got a seven card too that's cool and but who's buying the seven card
00:06:21.380
the consumer uh no the company okay the company buys seven cards for their teams right employee
00:06:32.320
I mean, I get that that's important, and that's not bad,
00:06:42.620
Right, I would probably look at smaller, right?
00:06:49.500
So I wouldn't look at corporate, I wouldn't look at,
00:06:54.080
uh probably uh fast moving consumer goods i would look in that direction you're looking at
00:07:02.400
industries i'm i'm asking you what is true about something in the company that tells you they're an
00:07:08.720
early adopter also for example for example if i was trying to figure this out for a consumer
00:07:17.360
i would ask them do you have tick tock account oh right right right right okay now i get it now i
00:07:24.720
get it yes yeah so then i would look to see if they already have a seven card first things first
00:07:31.120
because also seven card is in the same stage as us uh then i would look at um recruitment platforms
00:07:39.120
how do they recruit do they recruit through new uh platforming there are a couple of new
00:07:45.760
platforms here in romania that just started popping out like job full that do um gamified
00:07:52.560
recruiting so i look oh look are they using this are they using this gamified recruiting that's
00:07:57.760
different yeah they're in the target so that that's like that to me is is the answer to how
00:08:05.840
to find these people sevens card the recruiting platform one i like to use is google apps for
00:08:11.600
domains or google apps nice yeah so i do a reverse look up on the dns right because i can look i can
00:08:18.240
grab their either domain i can see if they have a mail record pointing to google's mail server
00:08:22.880
i'll look at um some of the technology on the marketing website right where i might see if
00:08:28.960
they're using clearbit data um seeing if they're using hubspot so like i'm looking for the fact
00:08:35.200
that they are not laggards they're early adopters actively looking yeah they're looking for an edge
00:08:42.240
yeah right because if they're willing to deploy these technologies then my technology seems like
00:08:48.880
a no-brainer right so you already got the csr that kind of validates the behavior or at least makes
00:08:54.640
it open to it you have the seven card which shows you that they care about employees perks so
00:08:59.360
literally if you could get a customer list of everybody at sevens card that would be a good
00:09:03.520
place to start and then reverse engineer from their customer base who are the people and then
00:09:07.760
see if they use these recruiting platforms yeah uh we are we actually can that's a good idea
00:09:13.680
that's a good idea yeah thanks that's the way i do it uh one more question and i'll promise i'll
00:09:19.600
leave you after this thank you um is regarding revenue model so we had a competitor on the
00:09:25.680
market that tried to merge with us but we rejected them in terms of you know it wasn't a good fit in
00:09:31.040
terms of founder uh founder team uh they were called team way uh and they had a couple of
00:09:37.280
companies already signed up uh larger let's say you know automotive manufacturing or whatever
00:09:45.760
but they had a different revenue model so they charged per ride so every ride would cost but it
00:09:52.240
wouldn't cost the employee again for the employee it was completely free it would cost for the
00:09:56.640
company two euros per ride uh and then a monthly fixed subscription of like 400 600 euros so we're
00:10:07.600
trying to to find our own revenue model that would work right now we're working with a per active
00:10:14.240
user so if we have a per active user is four euros per month per active user and a fixed monthly
00:10:21.760
subscription for like maintenance and servers or whatever um i'll tell you yeah i'll tell you a few
00:10:30.080
things the issue with the proactive users is it makes it hard for the company to estimate cost
00:10:36.960
right so the fixed monthly fee 100 and then what you call the value metric like what is the
00:10:44.480
um activity that lets me know that the business is getting value and that i'm getting value
00:10:50.640
i wouldn't do i mean again there's two things at your stage optimizing for pricing is actually not
00:10:56.640
what you need to be doing right you need to you need to optimize for usage you need distribution
00:11:03.040
okay the good news about software is you can change your pricing at any point and and most
00:11:08.320
of my clients that i coach they're changing their stock their pricing every six months
00:11:13.040
nice okay so so know that it's not about getting it right today it's about getting the data to be
00:11:20.160
able to look at the data to then figure out the pricing because like when i'm doing pricing uh
00:11:25.520
coaching i'm looking at the the the analysis of how people are currently using the products what
00:11:31.280
are the what is a histogram analysis of usage features by cohort to see oh these are the natural
00:11:39.280
break points of activities that make these plans or packages make sense right and anytime you you
00:11:47.200
peg a price to especially to an enterprise they just don't like surprises so if they don't have
00:11:55.040
any sense of if you don't say it's two dollars per registered users and you're going to deploy
00:12:00.160
this to 100 people and i can i know that um then it makes it tough for them to agree because
00:12:06.400
they're like well i don't know if it's 200 or 220 right right so i i would just say try to figure
00:12:13.120
out what an enterprise license could look like for now get 10 customers you know make sure you
00:12:19.360
price it so that you're not losing money and then um and then you use those 10 customers to to really
00:12:26.320
build the case study to then go sell and as you go get the next set of 10 customers then you'll
00:12:31.760
have enough data to be able to start looking at some of these things but if you didn't want to do
00:12:37.440
a per seat type pricing um active customers i think would create a lot of friction in the
00:12:44.640
buying process whereas i would rather do it per so like i know how many team members i have i'm
00:12:51.120
gonna invite them all to be on the platform and if i have more team members it costs me a few bucks
00:12:55.520
more right so instead of four bucks per active charge two dollars per employee right so you got
00:13:02.880
a value metric which means that the more employees their scale that the base fee but you're not
00:13:09.360
making them try to guess what the active is going to be does that help okay yeah yeah it helps a
00:13:16.640
bit but just the fact that we have to you know first collect some data that's that's for 100
00:13:22.640
pricing is an analysis game it's saying i thought these things would be valued to a customer it
00:13:28.080
turns out that this is because you might find out that maybe the most valuable thing to the
00:13:32.400
the employee is this chat thing that you've got built in the product right that people just love
00:13:37.200
right yeah so then you might say well it's the pricing the packages are this for the base plus
00:13:42.480
you get so many chat volume but if you go over a certain amount of chat volume just like slack
00:13:46.480
now you have to get pushed up to the next package right and then the per user fee seat is x right
00:13:54.400
instead of y so like to me it's really about can i get enough customers use the product get them
00:13:59.040
I'm using it then I can analyze it and figure out how I'm going to redesign the pricing and know
00:14:03.580
that was the most used yeah yeah just like your product changes your pricing should change every
00:14:08.300
six months you should be doing add-ons changing limits changing pricing yeah right right fair
00:14:15.740
enough thank you I'm just curious if you had one more question what would it be uh it would actually
00:14:22.100
be regarding um regarding scaling so how do you how do you push through right we're in romania
00:14:31.780
in this small tiny european country we've got a market of like two million people uh uh total
00:14:38.580
tam a total addressable market right we're probably gonna grab 200 000 in the best case scenario
00:14:44.660
right uh question is how do we break through into into the other countries especially taking into
00:14:51.140
account the high competition of uber uber pool uh bolt bolt pool or whatever comes comes after
00:15:00.180
so yeah so when it comes to international scaling i i personally obviously i'm canadian i do a lot
00:15:07.300
of stuff in the us it's kind of easy right i normalize my pricing in usd the canadians buying
00:15:12.500
usd um and even international it's always done in usd when i when i've worked with clients in in
00:15:19.540
europe or asia etc the question is first is do we use our local market to r d this and then make a
00:15:28.740
decision to go to the us okay so that's one decision so and some do some say look we've got
00:15:36.260
enough traction here it's great but you know what we're gonna join yc or we're gonna go do this
00:15:41.460
thing and we're gonna bring it to the us because the amount of effort to do that outweighs us
00:15:46.340
trying to dominate this region because it's a lot of different piece of currency as you know like
00:15:50.260
it's just so many intricacies versus okay we're going to make it in europe and really grow that
00:15:55.940
way and if you're doing it that way then what i've seen clients do especially if they're in like
00:16:01.620
germany or other parts of the uk um is they'll just they'll they'll they'll choose the natural
00:16:10.500
markets where they can get leverage right so the language the currency so you just got to be
00:16:16.260
strategic of like how you roll it out right but for the most part it's going to be country by country
00:16:22.900
so i don't know romania specifically but i think of it like bowling pins right is there and then
00:16:30.500
close cousins so there's the first pin which is romania what is the close cousin to romania what
00:16:35.140
are the two other countries that use the same currency or speak the same language or most
00:16:38.660
likely that are big what are they or have the most romanians because we're the second country in
00:16:44.340
immigration right perfect maybe yeah netherlands italy okay so then then you gotta you gotta
00:16:53.140
decide if i go to the netherlands right is that french the language uh dutch dutch um yeah yeah
00:17:02.660
so it's kind of like you want to figure out what's the least amount of moving parts because if i'm
00:17:07.380
going to go and create another language to go to a market then i could easily go to germany
00:17:14.580
which is larger yeah exactly and then and then from there i get more resources to then
00:17:20.740
build the rest and maybe i go romania germany uk kind of like a game of risk right it's always it's
00:17:28.980
always the strategy of saying what's the least amount of moving parts the minimum effective dose
00:17:34.580
for me to go to market to get distribution and if i'm going to add another currency or i'm going
00:17:40.020
to add another language anyway let's not do it with a small market when it's the same amount
00:17:45.300
of effort to do it with a big market right right right right but i can't be too far away
00:17:51.780
that maybe time zone or geography is going to cause issues from a support point of view
00:17:56.260
so there's kind of those constraints that i'm going to take into consideration
00:17:59.140
okay right so it's kind of like this sweet spot of like this is the one that looks the most like
00:18:05.120
us it's close to us they have a lot of romanian people there but it's a new language it's a big
00:18:10.900
enough market we can grow into so we can grab the romanian companies maybe initially then we'll
00:18:15.380
localize it language currency we'll be able to grab the full country and then that's going to
00:18:20.140
build the base for us to go to the next big one and once we get that third one then we can fill
00:18:25.340
in the rest of it because we'll have a bigger team and more resources most people don't realizing
00:18:29.840
that success is a sequencing problem so success equals sequencing right i need to strategically
00:18:40.040
look at the list of activities in the sequence i'm going to do them in that's going to give me
00:18:44.340
the most leverage that's why for a lot of companies from a growth point of view it's easier to double
00:18:50.060
down on something that's working today than to start something new that's unknown then because
00:18:56.860
i don't know if it's going to produce but this thing's working i know if i do more of it it's
00:19:00.860
going to work more so for now i'm going to do more of the thing that's working that's going to unlock
00:19:05.340
more profit which is allow me to invest in the team so i'll have a bigger team so when i go do
00:19:09.740
that other thing i'll be in a better spot than doing two things at the same time but not having
00:19:14.300
a big enough team to actually do either one really good right right fair enough yeah most companies
00:19:20.860
die most businesses startups they die from indigestion doing too many things at once
00:19:26.460
then starvation they think it's a lack of opportunity i'm telling you it's doing it's
00:19:33.020
not saying no enough yeah right because it's only in the know that it provides focus
00:19:39.020
so if you're not saying no just be aware that you may lack focus
00:19:46.260
because the best people in the world think about the best entrepreneurs in the world
00:19:52.700
you ask them for something they'll give you a yes or no right away why because they know
00:19:57.980
where they're going and if your thing aligns with where they're going great if it doesn't
00:20:03.180
no and startups don't typically approach it that way because they don't have enough
00:20:08.780
of a strategy a sequence a vision of where they want to go so just it's kind of a feedback loop
00:20:13.820
for you based on our conversation luca what what did you take away what are the big takeaways for
00:20:21.020
you so big big takeaways regarding the data that we have to analyze data of users before we even
00:20:29.340
start pricing it properly uh then second is about how to get paid do you get paid yeah yeah no we
00:20:36.620
get paid for sure that's not yeah uh then second how to target these early adopters innovators
00:20:44.460
company uh that we can have join our ranks as soon as possible and and start working with those and
00:20:51.340
how to identify the details that lead me to that and last but not least about focus about focus
00:20:59.180
because I get it, like smart rides is one of the ideas