Dan Martell - October 11, 2021


How To Find Early Adopters For Your B2B SaaS

Hosted by
Dan Martell
Mentioned
Jeffrey Moore
How To Become Unbreakable As An Entrepreneur How to Sell Your Business

Episode Stats


Length

21 minutes

Words per minute

171.01

Word count

3,650

Sentence count

—


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

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

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
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
00:06:27.940 Exactly, yeah.
00:06:28.780 Okay, now, yeah, please.
00:06:32.320 I mean, I get that that's important, and that's not bad,
00:06:36.800 but if I was also trying to find that
00:06:39.580 plus technology adoption.
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,
00:06:52.180 you know, high-
00:06:52.840 No, take at 600.
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
00:21:02.580 from our startup studio, you know?
00:21:05.280 So I 100% get that.
00:21:08.560 Awesome.
00:21:09.400 And I felt it, yeah.
00:21:10.700 It's a lot of fun.
00:21:11.540 Great conversation to create the time
00:21:13.220 and I look forward to staying connected.
00:21:16.300 For sure.
00:21:17.140 Thank you, thank you again.
00:21:17.980 Great conversation.
00:21:18.980 See you.
00:21:19.820 Cheers.