Chop Wood Carry Water | Scratchpad's Pouyan Salehi

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Patrick Campbell

Before enlightenment Chop would carry water. After enlightenment, Chop would carry water. This phrase has been passed down for eons, and my interpretation of it is that essentially, if you want to be great at something, whether it is mentally, physically, spiritually, you have to remember the fundamentals on top of that. And more importantly, you must continue to practice these basic needs day in and day out.

00;00;24;14 - 00;00;40;03

Patrick Campbell

If you want to be a great basketball player, you need to always focus on footwork and handling. If you want to be a great artist, you need to focus on structure and consistency. Nothing could be more applicable for B2B SaaS. In order to build a great business, you have to focus on all the fundamentals of operating and executing.

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Patrick Campbell

You need to effectively use capital, hire well, continue to book meetings, etc. You don't just reach an MA milestone and call it quits. And even if that checkpoint, it's acceptable to you to stay at that checkpoint, you have to continue to practice fundamentals in order to maintain that level. It's not as much about a checkpoint as it is about a personal best plan.

00;01;00;10 - 00;01;21;27

Patrick Campbell

Salahi, CEO of co-founder of Scratch Pad, is an excellent representation of this practice. As a serial entrepreneur and founder, Pouillon has done multiple tours of running and operating in B2B SaaS. You understand that before you reach a company enlightenment, you must chop wood and carry water. And after you reach company, enlightenment must chop wood and carry water for profitable recur.

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Patrick Campbell

It's protect to the hustle where we explore the truth behind the strategy and tactics of B2B SaaS growth to make you an outstanding operator. On today's episode, Pouillon Salahi dives deep on growth. We're going to talk about innovating a product with real demand, understanding how people work differently, establishing a consistent market fit hard lessons of a dynamic business environment, and working toward common goals with differing values.

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Patrick Campbell

Who are you and what do you guys do?

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Pouyan Salehi

I mean, thanks for having me. So my name is Boyan Salahi. I'm the CEO and co-founder at scratch back.

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Patrick Campbell

Then was Scratch Man.

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Pouyan Salehi

So Scratch Pad is the first workspace for revenue teams.

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Patrick Campbell

Okay. And that's an impressive line, though, by the way. Thank you. First workspace for revenue teams like that one got me like, oh, okay.

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Pouyan Salehi

Yeah. But I think it's still you know, it's still relatively early. The problem has existed for a long time. And so the whole reason we we even started scratch pad was what we observed is, you know, in most organizations you have Salesforce or some CRM, but let's just say it's outsource. But if you actually look at how the sales reps work, it's not in Salesforce.

00;02;26;24 - 00;02;44;22

Pouyan Salehi

Right. So you've got taking notes in Evernote. Mac notes are my notes. You've got, you know, pipeline management or account management and spreadsheets tasks are all over the place from Post-it notes to assign or to wunderlist to do list. And we saw this pattern over and over again at every sales team that we talked to and how reps works.

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Pouyan Salehi

And even at one company, people would have all sorts of different setups. And what we did is we kind of stitched that together and said, well, gosh, people are creating their duct taping their own workspace together. They're using these general purpose horizontal tools that, you know, project teams use and marketing teams use and sales teams use. Well, what if something existed designed specifically for a salesperson and also for the revenue team?

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Pouyan Salehi

And so that's the idea behind the workspace for our revenue team.

00;03;11;12 - 00;03;31;02

Patrick Campbell

And tie that tie that together for me and listeners like. So I've seen your site and such, but it's like right now in my head, based on your description, I'm thinking notion for revenue teams, how does that look? Rather than us just putting everything in Salesforce or putting everything in notion and porting it to Salesforce, like kind of describing it, it's a little hard because we're not looking at a demo.

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Pouyan Salehi

Let's use an analogy. Imagine if notion Erik Table in a sauna got together party one night and said, We're only going to do it for Salesforce. So that's it. So it's not and actually it Trello. Let's load Trello in the mix too because it's, you know, you can break down what we do into silos of like, okay, well there's a no taking piece and a spreadsheet piece and a common board and, and task.

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Pouyan Salehi

And we also have a multi data set search and you know, in a way those have existed for.

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Patrick Campbell

A long time.

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Pouyan Salehi

Yeah, you know, I'll be honest, we're not doing any, any of that like radically new. There are companies that have tried and failed. There are companies that are doing that today. There are companies that have this as a feature set in what they do, we observed and we approach was one. It doesn't it almost doesn't matter whether you have the functionality.

00;04;12;26 - 00;04;33;02

Pouyan Salehi

What matters is how easy is it to use. Interesting, right? And I think if for anyone that's listening that's in sales, hopefully this resonate it's like every single click counts, every single millisecond extra you have to wait counts. And so what we set out to do is create the fastest, simplest, most intuitive experience, not just for any one piece, right?

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Pouyan Salehi

There's there's so many different note taking apps that connect to Salesforce. And sure, you can hack all of this together through Zapier, connect Trello to continue to set integrations. One which rep is going to do that, right? And even if you do that as an ops person. So the thing that we we set out to do is say it's not just about one piece, it's about how you as a salesperson do your job.

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Patrick Campbell

Do you have it set up so that I don't even have to go into Salesforce?

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Pouyan Salehi

I just realize that I haven't gone into Salesforce in two weeks and they started using it two weeks ago. But the flip side is, well, you know, if any real ops folks are hearing that, they're like, Whoa, whoa, we want everyone to work out of sales in Salesforce. But that's the thing. And I think the way we've architected the system is that the reps, instead of having a go between Evernote and Google sheets or a table and all their task systems, they now have one place to do their work, but it's all connected to Salesforce, not through some bidirectional saying that you have to set up and manage and all that, but it actually is

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Pouyan Salehi

Salesforce. And so the ops team, the managers are happy data is their next steps are updated, pipelines clean and their apps are like, I'm getting more time in market than I ever have before.

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Patrick Campbell

It's so interesting because it's what I want to say and I hope you don't take offense. This is like what an amazing but sad opportunity that Salesforce sucks so much in terms of their UI. Like I'm not. We use Salesforce and there's a reason we use it, even though it's like painful, but it's almost like, you know, there have been so many of these products where it's like better analytics on top of Salesforce and you're like better UI basically on top of saying what more you access.

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Patrick Campbell

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

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Pouyan Salehi

In a way. But I think there's a lot to unpack there. We actually didn't set out to solve the Salesforce problem. And what I mean by that is listen, we all know it, Salesforce is really difficult to work with as an end user. I think they even know that right.

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Patrick Campbell

Now it's made for the VP or the director typically. Yeah, that's who you care about.

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Pouyan Salehi

And then it's forced down onto the wraps to say, Well, you have to update these things. And then the other hard part is every month, every quarter it changes. It's like, oh, the new product leader that just came in wants this field updated so they can understand why we're winning or losing or what's going on. And so what's happened is all all of this debt is now carried on the shoulders of the end users, the reps as burdened, right?

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Pouyan Salehi

So it's a drag that's put on them to say you now have to do all of this additional admin work. And they're like, Well, we should also be spending more time with customers and market. So the reason I say all of this is our entry point, the whole reason we started scratch pad wasn't to say, Oh, let's make Salesforce easier to work with.

00;06;53;25 - 00;07;07;26

Pouyan Salehi

We backed into that. What we did is say, how can we make the job of the salesperson more effective? How can we solve something, build something for them? Right? Because the analogy I like to draw is, you know, if you go outside of tech for a second and look at them, look at chefs.

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Patrick Campbell

Sure.

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Pouyan Salehi

You've got a kitchen that's optimized for your craft, You don't have the the fridge in one corner and in the stove in a completely different floor. It is optimized for your craft. You look at an artist, you have your studio that's set up for what you do, and if you look at it through that lens and say, Well, what if sales is the craft?

00;07;25;26 - 00;07;49;03

Pouyan Salehi

Yeah, well what do I have as a salesperson to be able to do my job in the best way that I can and that doesn't exist? And then it just so happened that we backed into saying, well, Salesforce is the most popular CRM, and so let's make sure that we connect to that. But I think it helps you kind of get a broader view and a more appreciation for what an individual rep does, but then also how that rep connects to the broader revenue team and how they work together.

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Pouyan Salehi

Yeah, Yeah.

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Patrick Campbell

Do you think that it's kind of an interesting conundrum because there's been other there's been a lot of tools that are focused on rep productivity because of the, I'll say, CRM problem. Like, I know we're kind of picking on Salesforce a little bit, but but every CRM has this. Even the new school is CRMs. They still have, Hey, this is a little bit cumbersome for the rep to like do something with.

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Patrick Campbell

And so I guess my question is, is like, was it the fact that you kind of combined a lot of this stuff so that you kind of made it so like it's one pain that I have to go to versus Salesforce in all these other places? Is it the approach? I'm sure there's a little bit of like a way that you set up the use of the experience of the experience, Probably a lot of things, but what was kind of driving.

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Pouyan Salehi

You through that? Because I think if I guess if anyone's listening and thinking about starting something, we actually challenge ourselves a lot. Before starting this, my co-founder and I, we've been together for ten years. We've built a lot of products that we share in a built, like there was no demand for it. We thought it was cool. Our last company was in the sales tax space and we got a lot of traction with.

00;08;47;05 - 00;09;05;17

Pouyan Salehi

We ended up selling it, but we had this empathy for it. But even then this problem wasn't obvious to us and, you know, everyone complained our salesforce is tough to use. Okay, So then you look at all the tools that are out there. Like you said, there's literally a graveyard of companies that have tried no taking apps or Salesforce spreadsheet type interfaces to Salesforce.

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Pouyan Salehi

I mean, Salesforce even has it. It's lightning. They've got Quip. They but there's so many different ways. And so for us, we said, well, what are we going to do that's any different? And when we studied those products and talked to other folks that were involved in those products and companies, what we learned is it's not a necessarily about the functionality like A has to be there.

00;09;24;07 - 00;09;42;04

Pouyan Salehi

But the fundamental point is about adoption. If you unpack that, then the adoption piece is, okay, well, why would a sales rep adopt something? And it's not because it's some flashy new tech, it's that it gives them real substantial value and some value. And then for wraps, you know, a lot of folks things think that reps are lazy.

00;09;42;04 - 00;10;09;15

Pouyan Salehi

They don't update Salesforce. I reject that. I think reps are not they're entering the information. It's just in their own spreadsheet. It's a note. It's not getting there. It's like, who wants to do work to show the work that they did? They're used to using these tools, but they don't want to spend time to learn something new. So we said, okay, if we can build something that is intuitive that you can hand to any single account executive or anyone on the sales team and within one minute they are completely set up and then they have a path to seeing themselves being successful with it.

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Pouyan Salehi

Then we have something. If we don't have that, we've got nothing. We are the same as any other B2B SaaS sales tech application. And so we spent the first 3 to 6 months just on that one piece. That's cool. And I think that right now is kind of proven it out. If you go to our website, you see the customer testimonials and the impact that it's had on people.

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Pouyan Salehi

Is that piece held out to be true, right? It was a it was a bet that we made, but that then unlock the doors for everything else to happen. So that's one part of it. The other piece is if you look at software products, B2B SaaS products, right now, in a way, you know, I go to one extreme and say it's all kind of trivial, like they're all application layer.

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Pouyan Salehi

You can you can get an A good enough team and you can build it. But what matters is the experience behind the product. So you could say right now there could be ten other clones of what we do, but they'll have a different flavor profile and it come back to food. I love what I love eating. And so now I've got yeah, it's bringing down a pizza, right?

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Pouyan Salehi

All right. Break that can break the pizza down into its components. You've got the dough, you've got the sauce, you've got the cheese, you got the toppings. And then you have the process for how you cook it. Yeah. Do you like pizza? I love you. All right. Do you have a favorite?

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Patrick Campbell

Sammy, Come on out. Pico here in Boston is amazing. Okay, You ever out in Boston? That's where you got to go.

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Pouyan Salehi

All right, So, yeah, but if I were to break those components down and a lot of, like, rub ops and investors even do this, I'll break something down into just the feature set, and you can do the same thing with food and pizza. But what is it about Pico that makes it your favorite pizza spot?

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Patrick Campbell

Really good ingredients and every layer. And then the cooking is.

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Pouyan Salehi

Precise, but there's something there. The way they put those ingredients together that makes it stand out for you. Totally. And I think it almost feels weird saying this, but I think the experience of a you know, of a SaaS product, the experience of a software product, does have a profile. There's a flavor profile. So that experience is what you feel.

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Patrick Campbell

Yeah, they do the whole like over little well done type pizza.

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Pouyan Salehi

But that's for you, right? Like that. Where somebody else might like the Chicago deep dish or somebody else likes the New York style. But I think the, the other piece that a lot of I think SaaS applications or software applications means is that it should at least for the end user, in my view, it should make you feel something.

00;12;13;26 - 00;12;35;27

Pouyan Salehi

Yeah, and it should and should have an experience behind it. So that's something again, we bet on and we said it's not just about the fact that you can update Salesforce, quickly, add notes and like make tasks and it's your workspace, but it should give you this experience. So you're like, I want to use this. I'm excited to use it while yeah.

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Patrick Campbell

Many of the tools that were created for this problem did not go from, I'm going to say, a bottoms up approach or an end user approach. You're doing the end user, you're creating like the pizza, you're the flavor, that kind of thing. Most of them, it sounds like they were a reaction to, Hey, your reps pissing and moaning constantly, Here's this thing.

00;12;53;04 - 00;13;05;08

Patrick Campbell

So they just kept selling it to the director and the VP versus like going after the rep. And so I guess my question is, is to continue the pizza metaphor and by the way, what if I would have said like Pizza Hut or something like how much a judge would you judge me?

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Pouyan Salehi

I don't I don't judge, madam, like yes, no, no judgment there. We all have, you know, we're actually doing and there's a whole nother component to this. Why? Why? I think there are other products before us. A failed is you have to have a certain level of flexibility.

00;13;19;16 - 00;13;38;24

Patrick Campbell

So this was my question. Pizza, right? Like you love Domino's Pizza. Great. It's like your style. You love consistency, right? Other fancy stuff you like. Like consistency of certain things, but a little bit of change every once in a while. Right. How do you account for that? Because one wraps use ever no one wraps used notion and now you're trying to say, hey, this thing is going to be okay for you.

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Pouyan Salehi

Let's say everyone's using every note, but they're using it in different ways. So many takes, very detailed notes, almost like they're basically transcribing. Yep, somebody else writes to bullet points, somebody else takes their notes during the call, somebody else does it after somebody does it. At the end of the day, when we were I mean, we literally shadowed reps, we sat behind several account email.

00;13;57;13 - 00;13;58;12

Patrick Campbell

Research, watch.

00;13;58;14 - 00;14;15;00

Pouyan Salehi

How they work. And and even then it wasn't obvious to us that, okay, we know how to do it. It was connecting a bunch of small dots, these observations that the picture slowly started to emerge. But I think, you know, if you look at the space today, even some of the, you know, other companies in our space, they're they're way too rigid.

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Pouyan Salehi

It's like your entry point into taking a note has to be from a calendar event and your fields are inside your note and then you have to update them. You can't come back and do it later. And so the other, you know, our approach to it was we'll be very opinionated on that. It has to be intuitive, it has to be fast and it has to be simple.

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Pouyan Salehi

But we need to be flexible enough to adapt to how different people work. It doesn't you've you've you've run sales teams, you're building a companies. Well, you know, even you take a small team, a ten person team, everyone has a slightly different method of working. We process information differently, we communicate differently. And so if you're building for end users, you have to be able to adapt to that.

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Pouyan Salehi

Otherwise what you're doing is saying, No, this is the only way that you can work. And then again, that comes back to what I was saying before, which our key thing was adoption. So if we're going for the best adoption, we have to have be flexible enough where we can adapt to these work styles. You as an end user can configure scratch pad in a way that works for you.

00;15;13;09 - 00;15;20;11

Pouyan Salehi

But now here's our challenge. We have to be able to then stay with this rigid system called Salesforce, right? So that's that's the secret sauce and the magic that we do.

00;15;20;18 - 00;15;40;06

Patrick Campbell

I imagine your growth brings more complexity, right? So if you think about you're always, you know, there's a really rigid like this is how you do product management, no taking or something like that. And then there's like something kind of like Trello, which is just so flexible. It can be used by all types, anyone who needs to do something right.

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Patrick Campbell

And you're kind of like writing this middle, right? And giving some flexibility for people to kind of expand out in each direction depending what they're trying to do. How do you think about that problem? Because every single sales team is.

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Pouyan Salehi

Such a hard problem. It is such a hard problem because that structure and that rigidity in a way, you need you need that process to be able to scale because, you know, you can look at this. If this thing were on the table, we could keep turning it around and looking at it through different lenses right? And you can look at it through the end user, which is the account executive account manager, sales engineer, like anyone on the end user and the revenue team.

00;16;12;22 - 00;16;32;11

Pouyan Salehi

And for them it's like, okay, listen, I'm, I'm working with customers. I have to get these deals across the finish line. I have to work on the renewals of them, account manager, upsells, and there's a certain level of flexibility I need to do my job. Maybe a little bit of structure, but not too much, but enough. You turn it and you look at it through the lens of revenue operations, sales, operations.

00;16;32;20 - 00;16;55;08

Pouyan Salehi

It's all about consistency. It's all about process, it's all about standardizing. And that's important to scale, right? And so I'm not saying that that's bad, but it's it's at the intersection of these two that it becomes really difficult because on one extreme, you have what exists today in most organizations, which is, you know, the sales or the sales ops or have ops team comes and say, we need to follow MedPAC.

00;16;55;18 - 00;17;16;07

Pouyan Salehi

We have these stage requirements at every when you move a stage from 2 to 3, you have to fill these things out on clause one. This has to happen. And it's a massive page layout. In Salesforce, we required field validation was all of this stuff. It is the epitome of rigidity. Yeah. And so they need that. But on the flip side, you've got the reps are like, f all that, I'm just going to do my stuff in notes.

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Pouyan Salehi

And so we're coming in and saying, okay, how can we keep the structure? But then give you a way to say, you know what, when I look at my stage two ops, I, I prefer to process information with like this field, this field, this field. And this way I may look at it differently. I like to see closed date first and then this piece.

00;17;31;19 - 00;17;48;14

Pouyan Salehi

So I think there's a room where you can be flexible but still have that rigidity. It's a huge design challenge and honestly, that's like, you know, back to why I guess you didn't ask this, but like, why me and my co-founder really, like, leaned in. This is like when we had the observation of, okay, we think we know the problem, we have a unique angle on it.

00;17;48;14 - 00;18;03;08

Pouyan Salehi

There was also another component, I guess that's something we're excited about. That's something we feel like we can get up and like get fired up about every single day. And like, you know, we just get really fired up about design challenges that impact how people work. And that's sort of like, yeah, let's let's do this, do it.

00;18;03;08 - 00;18;13;09

Patrick Campbell

Yeah, yeah. So we were about to get into that. Great. How did you get here? Like, what were you doing? Like, what's the history?

00;18;13;24 - 00;18;14;09

Pouyan Salehi

How far back?

00;18;14;24 - 00;18;16;16

Patrick Campbell

As far as you know, that we got to. Right?

00;18;16;24 - 00;18;24;00

Pouyan Salehi

You know, you mentioned Domino's Pizza, so I actually I grew up, you know, I'm an immigrant to the country like originally from Iran, came here. I grew up you know, I've.

00;18;24;17 - 00;18;26;04

Patrick Campbell

Probably spent 45 minutes talk about that.

00;18;26;04 - 00;18;34;21

Pouyan Salehi

You know, it's there's all sorts of stuff to talk about there. But no, like, I started working when I was nine, Like we parents had a Domino's Pizza franchise and like.

00;18;34;21 - 00;18;41;12

Patrick Campbell

I love Domino's, by the way, that's like classic. If we're just getting some quick. And the other point that Domino's is great.

00;18;41;12 - 00;19;03;09

Pouyan Salehi

So even with that, you know, I'll fast forward a bit. I joke later on, you know I studied engineering went to business school at Harvard, and I joke that I learned more about product and business from running the pizza shop than at than at HBS. But even if you look at it within the constraints of Domino's, right, you think are fairly standardized franchise model, even within that, you have so much variance in how you approach those simple ingredients, putting them together.

00;19;03;09 - 00;19;19;06

Pouyan Salehi

And that's why you've got some Domino's that you like and others that you don't. Yeah. And and so anyway, I grew up running that I was managing that store. I always knew I love to build, I love to create. I had no idea what it would turn into. And then I knew I love problem solving and understanding how things work.

00;19;19;06 - 00;19;37;17

Pouyan Salehi

That's why I did engineering. Going to business school was more of that thread, which was I felt like I understood how to build things and products and and what have you. But I didn't quite understand just how the world of business worked. At a macro level, I understood it like a small business. So that was a business school crowd.

00;19;37;17 - 00;19;59;05

Pouyan Salehi

To satisfy that curiosity, I ended up at Apple for a few years, work there in like hardware operations. You know, I think I then saw, you know, and this was when the iPhone had like just launched and I started to see just just the impact the applications were having as I really wanted to move towards that. And yeah, for the last ten years I've been doing doing startups.

00;19;59;09 - 00;20;00;00

Pouyan Salehi

That's cool. Yeah.

00;20;00;15 - 00;20;05;01

Patrick Campbell

Yeah, that's wild. I want to talk to you about Iran, but Iran, sorry, but it's like, yeah, it.

00;20;05;01 - 00;20;15;05

Pouyan Salehi

Was the middle of the Iran-Iraq war. Like, I remember there was a surface to air gun not too far from our house I think was going off every night. Bombing raids would happen and lights shut off. You got to go outside.

00;20;15;05 - 00;20;18;01

Patrick Campbell

And so it sounds like you were old enough to remember. Yeah, not.

00;20;18;01 - 00;20;22;04

Pouyan Salehi

Just old enough to remember. I grew up in Minnesota, which there weren't any other Iranians there I.

00;20;22;04 - 00;20;22;12

Patrick Campbell

Grew up in.

00;20;22;13 - 00;20;27;21

Pouyan Salehi

HOSKINSON okay. So you know, the Midwest. Yeah, fairly well. And what that's about funny.

00;20;27;21 - 00;20;32;27

Patrick Campbell

How many immigrants all over the place end up Minnesota and Wisconsin. Yeah. Anyways, so.

00;20;33;00 - 00;20;51;01

Pouyan Salehi

Anyway, no, but it's you know, I think that's what kind of drove me to, you know, because if I look back on the journey of starting companies, it's been there probably a lot of times. I should've quit. Yeah, a lot of times when it was just the writing was on the wall, like, This isn't working. Just go get a job again.

00;20;51;01 - 00;20;51;28

Patrick Campbell

Do your thing. Do your.

00;20;51;28 - 00;21;09;10

Pouyan Salehi

Thing. But I felt like, you know, growing up and having left Iran, but still having a ton of family there and seeing like, like what the what the hell do I have to complain about here? But like, those folks are just struggling to, like, get a basic education there. There's all these things outside of their control. And like here all these opportunities are available.

00;21;09;10 - 00;21;18;19

Pouyan Salehi

And I think that's what underlined a lot of the drive to say like, I almost have this responsibility to like make the most of this. And and I think that's what's kept me going. That's cool. Yeah.

00;21;19;00 - 00;21;31;01

Patrick Campbell

Yeah. It's one of those I think you you meet a lot of folks who have that perspective, right, That DNA like it keeps you going. And there's a lot of ways up the mountain, but it's it's, it's really fascinating. Yeah.

00;21;31;03 - 00;21;48;11

Pouyan Salehi

Also, it's also fun. And I think when you kind of fast forward the ten years of startups but I think you know, when you when you get a good team together so like my co-founder and I've been working together for ten years now, right. And I feel like when when you get a good team together and and you're just you're gelling, you're aligned, you like solving similar problems.

00;21;48;23 - 00;22;01;02

Pouyan Salehi

It's just a lot of fun, too. Our last company was that's a yeah but it word the product's still alive and it's there wasn't a well it like not a huge success and that's really tough to kind of go through that especially in Silicon Valley but like.

00;22;01;08 - 00;22;15;12

Patrick Campbell

How do you get through that? Like what's the, you know, like because I can imagine like, like the thing if it if it goes into the ground and maybe your first company did that, it kind of is like, we can look at it, we can go, okay, this is why I went wrong. Maybe it was in my control, maybe it wasn't.

00;22;15;12 - 00;22;25;21

Patrick Campbell

And depending on that, you'd learn to live with that or whatever. But if it kind of like Midland, you know, it's kind of like it's a weird thing because you're kind of like, I'm giving up on this baby because the baby isn't growing enough. Now I want to move on to the next baby, right?

00;22;25;22 - 00;22;33;23

Pouyan Salehi

It's like there are times I wish it would have just crashed and burnt because it would have been an easier It's an easy outcome at that point. Failure.

00;22;34;03 - 00;22;38;11

Patrick Campbell

That kind of failure is like almost heralded, you know, in our world. So yeah.

00;22;38;11 - 00;22;54;02

Pouyan Salehi

It's and I think a lot of founders or a lot of folks may even get a product market fit early on and then it just stops. You just kind of flatline. And those aren't the stories that are really written about. Yeah, right. But there's so many more of those than I think a lot of folks realize. And that's a really hard place to be.

00;22;54;06 - 00;23;11;10

Patrick Campbell

When the hard part about that, too, is that people are like, Oh, it's amazing. It's so hard to get to one, three, ten, whatever it is. And you're like, Yeah, there's a lot of companies that die here, you know, because you figured it out or you rode a wave that isn't there anymore and all those types of things.

00;23;11;10 - 00;23;23;29

Patrick Campbell

And in fact, Mark fit's not really a binary thing, right? How do you kind of keep that pulse then, after you've had that an initial traction to kind of keep going?

00;23;24;14 - 00;23;43;04

Pouyan Salehi

There's so much content out there and these blog posts, Oh, you need to get to a million in our hour and then you can raise your ad you need to get the product market fit and then everything's grades or you get to 10 million and like, oh, it's all open. I think it's all right. Because you have you can look at so many different companies that have stalled out at 1 million, 5 million, 30 million at 50 million at least.

00;23;43;04 - 00;24;13;10

Pouyan Salehi

My view on it is with especially with product user fit, product market fit, you constantly have to be focused on it. Yeah, it's it's not like once you get there that like okay our companies there and then like everything is static, like the world is constantly changing. Yeah, the market's constantly changing. And so it's something that I, you know, me, my team were always paying attention to and not just saying that, hey, just because we've had this, you know, this incredible success and growth, this crash I've had so far, that like, oh, great, we're good, it's over.

00;24;13;10 - 00;24;21;22

Pouyan Salehi

We figured out like, oh, no. Almost every day for us we approach is like beginner mindset. We're just learning. Challenge your own assumptions. Well, you've.

00;24;21;22 - 00;24;37;27

Patrick Campbell

Seen this really painfully with a lot of seasonal sales enablement tools where, you know, the whole like email tracking craze, right? You remember that like 24 products there and then like a lot of them got heavy funding and then they all had to pivot hard in many different directions.

00;24;38;06 - 00;25;00;19

Pouyan Salehi

I think it's it's important to know and this comes back to that product market set piece, how substantial is the problem that you're solving? Interesting, because otherwise you can be fooled and say, all right, you got you got the product market fit, but it's not a very durable product market fit. And I mean, you and I'm using that term loosely simply to say, okay, you've solved enough of a problem where some people are willing to pay you and it's growing month over month to some degree.

00;25;00;19 - 00;25;19;28

Pouyan Salehi

Yeah, but if you don't know and I said, I've made this mistake, my co-founder made this mistake, we made it together and we really tried hard to not do it this time around, which is think ahead a couple of steps and say, okay, great, assume that's true. Then what? Yeah, because, you know, there's so much capital now and there's so many folks funding now that there's going to be clones and copycats left and right.

00;25;19;28 - 00;25;38;25

Pouyan Salehi

We've had people copy our messaging left and right. People are trying to we've had literally literal clones of scratch pad already. And so we're always looking ahead like we have a very clear vision. We see those pieces. But that came through some hard lessons, right? Because we didn't do that last time around. We thought, great, like we came out, we're growing month over month.

00;25;38;25 - 00;25;57;11

Pouyan Salehi

We've got 2 million revenue super quickly at our last company. We're like, We're good. Let's just keep growing. And we didn't have a clear vision or kind of that clarity on what is the deeper problem that we're solving. How do these pieces connect together? And I'm not saying that you need to have that right away or that it's like that stuff comes to you all at once, but just to constantly challenge yourself and ask that question.

00;25;57;29 - 00;26;19;06

Patrick Campbell

I think that that exposes the constant precipice that you have to be on which is by design. You have to kind of drink your own Kool-Aid of like this is one of the most important, you know, issues or important things that we need to solve within this market. And then it's all of a sudden, like if you're if you're not also being like, yeah, but everyone else is going to like, come into this, or maybe this feature will get commoditized.

00;26;19;13 - 00;26;30;10

Patrick Campbell

If you're not having those two conversations in your head, almost schizophrenic, unfortunately, all of a sudden you're running into a world where you know the market can go too far astray or you don't see it coming, which is always the pain or even.

00;26;30;10 - 00;26;45;24

Pouyan Salehi

Falling in love with your own product. That's one of the things that we always do, is just say, I'm like, Well, why do we buy we buy our own product and not from the features in the functionality now, but looking at it and challenging it through that lens of would we buy something to solve the problem here that matters?

00;26;46;06 - 00;26;50;27

Pouyan Salehi

And so I think that's like being connected to that is so important.

00;26;51;09 - 00;27;10;14

Patrick Campbell

Besides kind of training your brain too, to not go too high or too low, I guess. Do you have like triggers and things like that that you like look for? Is there like a meeting you do periodically for this? Is there like, like is there something that's a little more functional or is it literally just like constantly asking the question?

00;27;10;14 - 00;27;30;09

Pouyan Salehi

You know, I think it starts with the founding team, but then creating that space and leaving it open for your own team to say, hey, like maybe, maybe we don't really matter all that much this way. Yeah. And really setting that culture to say, let's be objective. But it's also be critical of the work that we're that we're doing ourselves and saying just because we built this thing, that it's awesome and it has to be there.

00;27;30;09 - 00;27;44;29

Pouyan Salehi

Yeah, maybe the features and functionality are awesome, but does that matter? And how does that fit into both the users lives but also whoever we're selling to? Yeah, and that's the piece that I think we we just keep obsessing over.

00;27;44;29 - 00;27;45;13

Patrick Campbell

That's cool.

00;27;45;18 - 00;27;52;23

Pouyan Salehi

I like that. And even if you're off, you're off. Be honest enough with yourself to say we messed up here. Like, yeah, let's, let's reset that debate.

00;27;52;24 - 00;28;08;19

Patrick Campbell

Culture, I think is really important. I think it's hard because people hear debate. They think yelling or personal attacks, you know, things like that. But I think it's more of like always be seeking that truth and then always be willing to have that conversation. When you take things personally, that's when it gets a little volatile because you know it's your baby.

00;28;08;19 - 00;28;16;08

Patrick Campbell

You're like, no, this is the future. But that voice that's like, I don't know, like, that's that ends up being the kernel of like, the evolution that needs to take place.

00;28;16;09 - 00;28;34;13

Pouyan Salehi

Well, I think that that actually I would challenge that a little bit. Whereas the second the second we started hiring folks, it was no longer my baby, my co-founders baby. It's anyone that joins the team. And so we we were very deliberate about our values upfront. I always thought, okay, that's something you do. It's a little bit later.

00;28;34;13 - 00;28;51;28

Pouyan Salehi

Yeah, it's stage at a company. But in this case with Scratch, we had very, very deliberate and we challenged them and we really connected it to behaviors that we valued. But one of the core values that we set out was ideas, and that the fact that ideas, regardless of who they come from, where they come from, those are what we debate.

00;28;52;17 - 00;29;17;04

Pouyan Salehi

And so then living that by saying, Oh, hey, you could be a new team member, you literally joined yesterday and you should be able to contribute in the same way that a co-founder does or a leader does. And it's the idea that's front and center and we can debate those all day long. And that, I think, has led to this culture where you can, yeah, like challenge something and say, you know what, like maybe, maybe this is the better way to do it, or what if we did this?

00;29;17;10 - 00;29;20;09

Pouyan Salehi

That's not easy to do. But I think that that's the important piece behind it.

00;29;20;09 - 00;29;39;22

Patrick Campbell

We went even more intense. We say think critically be disagreeable. Yeah that's that that that principle that we go after. But I think you brought up a really good thing there that not really the topic of what we're talking about but it's behaviors that you want to reduce or improve on. That's the thing with values. And if there's no tradeoff, I think you don't have a value like the.

00;29;40;03 - 00;29;41;20

Pouyan Salehi

Empty words against their in.

00;29;41;25 - 00;30;00;27

Patrick Campbell

Trade off of ideas and stuff like that is sometimes you're going to go a little slower. Sometimes it can be a little more volatile, like there's an actual tradeoff to that being a value. And sometimes when you set them too early, you had experience like we were setting them as a first time founder. It's like, know, you get a little too aspirational and also like you're not you ride like necessarily because you don't know who you are until you've been in the trenches.

00;30;00;27 - 00;30;04;25

Patrick Campbell

But we finally got a good set that I think is like lasting for a long time. So yeah.

00;30;05;02 - 00;30;10;05

Pouyan Salehi

No, you're right. We had the benefit where it was, you know, it was a core team that had worked together for a while.

00;30;10;05 - 00;30;11;07

Patrick Campbell

Yeah, exactly.

00;30;11;07 - 00;30;22;11

Pouyan Salehi

And that that helped us. We just kind of reflected back like, what are the values, what are the behaviors that we gravitate towards or that we respect out of each other and other team members we work with? And what are the ones where we've been like? We don't we don't want that again.

00;30;22;11 - 00;30;25;20

Patrick Campbell

Yeah, it makes sense. Where can people find you and anything to plug.

00;30;25;25 - 00;30;28;11

Pouyan Salehi

Scratch fan So it if you're on a revenue team.

00;30;28;11 - 00;30;30;22

Patrick Campbell

I'm excited to be like Hey Peter you gotta check this out.

00;30;30;22 - 00;30;45;14

Pouyan Salehi

Yeah I you know, and listen, we love feedback so and so I think it's certainly one there. And I feels like, you know, even though we were a couple of years and we're just getting started, there's a lot of cool stuff we're launching there. But yeah, I'm on LinkedIn, I guess I'm on Twitter, although not super active there, but they're awesome.

00;30;45;14 - 00;30;45;22

Patrick Campbell

Brother.

00;30;45;24 - 00;30;46;19

Pouyan Salehi

Yeah, we'd love to connect.

00;30;46;27 - 00;30;48;01

Patrick Campbell

Appreciate it, man. This is awesome.

00;30;48;01 - 00;30;51;15

Pouyan Salehi

Yeah, thanks for having me.

00;30;51;15 - 00;31;11;02

Patrick Campbell

A huge shout out to everyone for doing the podcast. Now you have what it takes to be a stellar operator, particularly when it comes to the fundamentals. Today we talked about innovating a product with real demand, understanding how people work differently, establishing a consistent market, fit hard lessons of a dynamic business environment, and working towards common goals with differing values.

00;31;11;21 - 00;31;35;24

Patrick Campbell

And if you want to support profit well in the show, we would greatly appreciate it if you left a five star review of the podcast or the equivalent of wherever you listen or watch the podcast. God tend to like that type of thing and we like to appease the podcast gods. Thanks for listening and make sure you subscribe to and tell your friends about Protect the Hustle, A podcast from Prophet will Recur the largest, fastest growing media network dedicated to the world of subscriptions.