The day before I left Stripe to begin my startup journey, our CEO Patrick Collison happened to be visiting the NYC office. Following his all-hands presentation, I approached Patrick to let him know that I was planning to launch my own YC startup. I asked him what single piece of advice he could offer me.
Patrick thought for a moment and said "I see more people give up too late rather than give up too early."
While this is sound advice, I ultimately over indexed on his statement. Within two weeks of beginning the YC batch, Akash and I prematurely pivoted away from our original idea: helping people unlock the 90% of information they read and forget about.
Why? We mistakenly believed there wasn't a viable B2B use case for our product and felt compelled to pursue a direction with clearer B2B potential.
So, rather than building for a problem we deeply understood, we began searching for a B2B problem area which we thought would generate revenue. Via a random series of events, we found ourselves investigating sales tech.
In early March, after speaking with hundreds of GTM leaders and facing the impending YC demo day deadline, we decided to double down on a bet that sales reps with deep product knowledge are more likely to close deals than those without.
Frankly, I still firmly believe in this thesis. The biggest asset a sales rep has with their clients is trust. After all, why would I buy from someone who I don't think understands my problems?
Ironically, selling Zenfetch to sales teams was an uphill battle, as neither Akash nor I had deep empathy for a B2B SaaS sales rep's workflow. Moreover:
We were a high touchpoint product. Our product required access to internal company documentation and had a bot present in every sales meeting.
In the current market, GTM leaders are much more concerned with top of funnel and preventing churn than they are worried about mid-funnel conversion.
Akash and I weren't building for ourselves. We weren't even using the tool as we already knew our product inside and out.
All that said, the single largest contributing factor to us leaving sales tech is we never lost passion for our original idea. While I had a lot of difficulty admitting it, by mid July, there was nothing tying me to sales tech other than sunk cost fallacy.
In other words, now was the right time to listen to Patrick.
So, after running a full-fledged sales effort and barely getting any traction, we made the difficult (albeit relieving) decision to leave sales tech.
I'm incredibly proud of the product we’ve built and the amazing GTM professionals we met along the way. There's still a lot of opportunity in augmenting sales reps with AI, especially in real time coaching.
Our sales tech journey might have come to a close, but our founding journey is still in its infancy. I've never been more excited to work on something, and our ongoing closed beta is showing promising results.
If you'd like to stay up to date with how we're helping people improve cognition, feel free to check out our website and/or subscribe to my newsletter :)