118: The Age of Product-Led Sales with Evan Lewis

Thank you to our partners, SalesLoft, LeadIQ, and Costello for helping us put this one on. Find all our upcoming events at jbarrows.com slash events. Good afternoon, everybody. This is John Barrows with Make It Happen Mondays. Hope you all had a fantastic weekend. I have a very interesting guest who I'm actually having on my podcast now because he had me on his, what, was it a couple of years back? Yeah, three or four years ago. Three or four years ago. So, Evan Lewis, you want to introduce yourself to the group and give you a little background on what you're doing these days? For sure. Absolutely. Thanks, John. Yeah, it's funny how these things come around. Happy that I could be a guest and return the favor.

And obviously, you know, been a huge fan of you for a long time, so it's great to be on Make It Happen Mondays. Yeah, to give everyone a little bit of background on who I am and why I'm here. So, I've had a bit of a winding road in the startup and now in the venture capital space. So, I started my own company out of school in the online education space, which was, as I like to say, a beautiful failure based here in Toronto in the B2B SaaS space again. And, yeah, so I was initially, I was a business grad who fell in love with coding and building products on the web. And this starts sort of the winding road. But essentially, I started as a product-based founder and that business failed for a couple of different reasons, which we'll get into.

One of the main reasons, though, was we did not get out of the building and we didn't sell effectively. So, naturally, I wanted to learn how to sell. And so, I got in with a company called Post Beyond when it was essentially the founders, a couple of guys sitting around a table with a prototype and some initial customers. So, I was an SDR, then an AE, then I managed SDRs, then I managed AEs, then I ended up really running enterprise deals myself. And so, got to see and go through a lot of growing pains in an early growth stage B2B SaaS company. So, we raised a Series A, had some challenges, but the company is still around today. And then I actually, towards the tail end, moved back into a product role because I had, you know, gone through three and a half, four years of great sales education.

And because I knew the customers very well and I had some frustrations around our product not moving fast enough, we were hiring for a PM and I actually became our first ever product manager. So, did about 14 months of sort of formal product management, you know, working with our Scrum engineering team, all that stuff. And then about two and a half, three months ago, I made a switch. So, moved into the venture capital space at Georgian Partners. So, we're a growth stage VC firm based here in Toronto. And they brought me in to build out a new program, which we call our growth program, which essentially is all about being proactive with how we build relationships with companies and how we add value to companies before we invest.

So, one of the things hopefully we'll get into today is, you know, sort of the parallels between venture capital and SaaS. And, you know, the thing that I like to say about the program that I'm building is it's almost like a freemium VC type model, right? You know, a company can get to know us and understand our value. And, you know, we're giving a lot before we get in terms of making an investment. So, that's kind of me in a nutshell, but excited to dig into the talk today. Yeah, just kind of curiosity, because I'm always curious, like the type of companies VCs invest in, right? I mean, I've always been somewhat ignorant to this space of investment. I've never gotten investment. I've never wanted investment, probably much to my dismay as far as success is concerned.

But, like, between private equity and VCs. So, what's your real focus from an investment standpoint? Who do you, what type of companies do you look for? For sure. Yeah, and I want to preface this by saying I am extremely inexperienced when it comes to the world of venture capital. And, by no means do, you know, I am not a know-it-all, but, you know, I'm happy to sort of speak from my experience. And, I'm trying to learn as quickly as possible. And, you know, I definitely share some of those feelings in terms of venture capital has a lot of, it's a bit of an enigma, right? Because, you know, it's really hard to, until you're in it and you kind of understand the inner workings of a VC business, there's a lot of mysteries, right?

And it can be pretty scary, truthfully. I mean, you know, as a former founder, I was kind of scared shitless of VCs and, you know, what I'd have to prepare and not making a complete fool out of myself. So, you know, to get to Georgian and one of the reasons that I was so excited to join, I mean, number one, it's all about the team, right? So, Georgian, our stage, Georgian is very unique in that we have, we're not just money, but our sort of core differentiator is around our impact team. So, we invest typically $20 to $50 million, Series B, Series C rounds is kind of our sweet spot. So, growth stage companies and specifically ones that have a core belief around AI and machine learning driving significant impact for their end users and significant value for the business.

So, you know, typically they'll have some proprietary data that they're looking to leverage through prediction models or, you know, we talk a lot about building trust and, you know, explainability of AI. There's a whole lot of stuff we could get into there, but I think... Even the phrase AI. Tell me about it. I mean, you know, machine learning is, that's the easier thing to think about. I like to talk more so about machine learning, and it's really just crunching a lot of data, looking at patterns, and then, you know, trying to use those patterns to make predictions of future outcomes, right? If you really want to dumb it down. And the interesting thing with machine learning, too, is there's essentially different pockets of it that are used and different techniques that are used to solve business problems, essentially, right?

So, that's kind of the way I think about it. You know, I like to essentially try to play the translator, right? Because I'm kind of in between, you know, I've got some technical experience, but not a lot. And then also, you know, I understand the go-to-market side pretty well. So, I'm constantly, you know, trying to figure out how can I clearly and effectively communicate the complexity of these things to, you know, different folks. So, you know, back to Georgian and the impact. So, we have in-house about 20 different folks that are experts in different areas of machine learning, right? So, we have, you know, guys who are PhDs in conversational linguistics and natural language processing and all these different things.

And the reason that's super impactful is because that type of talent is extremely hard to find. And so, the way I like to position it is if you partner with Georgian, and I can't stress enough the word partner there, that, you know, you're not just taking our money, but you're getting access to that impact team that's going to work with you to identify what are the opportunities that your product has for AI and ML. And then, let's put a plan together on how we actually help you go from zero to one on that, such that, you know, you're getting a significant step change in your product, and we're helping you every step of the way, which, again, has a lot of parallels to, you know, a consultative sales model in SaaS.

And so, yeah, that's, you know, we're an extension of a company's R&D team. And that's how, you know, we try to really add significant value for our portfolio companies. Love it. And I think that translates well into our conversation today, as far as, you know, where I wanted to start with you, which is, you know, product-centric sales versus, the product versus how you sell it, right? I mean, there's, I was at 10 Bounds last year at the conference, and I wish I had kind of popped in for a little bit. I was bouncing around, but I saw this one presentation by this woman about how, you know, product-centric sales is really what the future, like, almost the Amazon, you know, a model of get people to use it, just get them, you know, and then agile, if you will.

They'll make adjustments based on the feedback, and then seed and grow. So, and the comparison was Dropbox versus Box, right? Which is Dropbox went effectively top-down, Box went bottom-up. And you could argue either approach, right? And the models were different and all that other stuff. But you can't really argue the evaluation of both, right? Because I think Dropbox's evaluation of, like, 5 to 10 times 10x what Dropbox or what Boxes is. It's because they had so many individual users, but, and I, and I, and I got what she was saying, right? I got the whole idea of, like, hey, let the market tell, like, instead of you coming in and trying to stuff some huge thing down, you know, hey, look at all of us, like, get your product out there, get people using it, iterate, iterate, iterate, get, you know, Slack is a perfect example of that, right?

But those are very few and far between type companies that can lead with such a viral thing that people pick up on, and then you seed and grow it. Most companies have a product, they come up with it because there is a need in the marketplace, at least that they perceive, and then they have to go sell it. And, and so I'm, I think, you know, you can, you, you have a unique perspective here because, you know, you've come from both sides. You've come from the product side, and then you've come from the sales side of the house. How much do you think, moving forward specifically, and another piece of this, which is the machine learning part of this, that you have artificial intelligence, you have machine learning, that is getting really, really smart, really fast, and can have natural language when reaching out to, you know, can write emails better than sales reps can.

So, I guess my question for you is, how much moving forward here is, is the quote unquote success of a company going to be based off of the product that, that they sell and, and the frictionless sale type of approach versus getting somebody to actually sell it? Man, I could talk all day about this. I love it. I, um, I got a lot of thoughts. Um, so I guess to, to preface it, um, I'll give a little bit of backstory and a little bit more color to, um, my startup journey and how, uh, I was almost on the wrong end of this trend for product, you know, being product led versus sales led, um, twice. So, uh, in my, in my first company, you know, we were trying to build a product led business, um, and, you know, and in that case, it somewhat made sense because, um, you know, it was, it was an online education app.

There was, you know, we're trying to go the realm of, you know, the Udacity's and the Coursera's and, um, that type of thing. So, you know, self-serve, um, little friction. Um, so we tried to build a self-serve product and then that, that company failed because we didn't sell and validate and we didn't get product market. We didn't refine what we thought was the core product to get to product market fit. So I'm like, okay, well, say I need to learn how to sell. Right. So then at post beyond, um, early days, we learned to sell extremely well. And we were a, I would say a very, um, sales and CS heavy business. Um, so we like to think about sort of the, you know, the four legs of the table. And I would say, um, you know, the legs were a little bit uneven.

We had a lot of muscle on the go-to-market side and, um, because of that, I think the amazing thing about a product led model is the accountability that it brings to the organization in terms of stickiness. Um, so, um, making sure that, um, ultimately, you know, making sure that ahead of, um, ahead of someone actually giving you their money, that they're going to get value and utility. Right. If you can prove that at a small scale, chances are you can prove that at a larger scale. Um, so that's what, you know, what we struggled with, um, you know, being a sales led business, we didn't have that accountability on the product side because, you know, we could sell a big deal. We could sell a $50,000 deal.

Um, but because we didn't feel that accountability, then we had a lot of churn, right? We would sell, we would sell, um, you know, 10,000 licenses and we may have, um, only 20% adoption. And ultimately that's the rubber hits the road, you know, people don't accept that anymore. Right. That's, um, you know, they may have accepted it, you know, five years ago and, and you sure you can try to set expectations to say, oh, you're only going to get X amount of adoption. But the reality is people expect, um, products, you know, they have extremely high expectations based on the consumer apps that they use every day. Right. Yeah. If something isn't sticky and it's not intelligent and it's not personalized, they're not going to use it.

Right. Um, so I think, you know, what the beauty of, um, the product led model is, you know, the accountability of the user, um, the fact that it reduces friction too, right? Like it puts a salesperson in such a position of strength, um, if they can expose the product to the end user, like a Dropbox, um, or, you know, the, the example I love to use is, uh, app cues, right? Um, so those guys are doing product led extremely well. And I bought app cues at my last company. Um, and this is, this comes into a presentation I did, um, at that product led summit last year around the tail of three funnels. Um, so essentially, you know, I won't get into too many details, but, um, app cues did an incredible job.

Um, there, there was one company that was running a traditional enterprise sales model, right? Um, where they were selling, they were demoing, but they didn't want to give us the keys, right? Or they put up a bunch of friction and, and didn't give us the keys. Um, there was one company that was sort of dipping their toe in the water and said, sure, you can try it, but it's limited and this and that. Um, and then app cues comes in and they're like, get the browser extension, you know, get going, get, um, your flows live in production. And then, so not only is the experience great, but then the salesperson comes in and they're in a position of power to be, you know, the consultant and the expert and to really focus on, um, understanding how you're trying to use the product.

And tailoring their sales approach to that. Right. So I think, um, you know, that's a long winded way of saying, I think, you know, the, the product led model, uh, is the future even in the enterprise. Um, but getting that right is obviously, you know, not the easiest thing. So, but what you just explained there with the product led model and the sales rep now can be very consultative with their approach, right? Of making sure that they're using it the right way. That to me sounds like customer success. So, so I guess, you know, my question is, is with, with the, with the, with the understanding now that if your product isn't legit, right? Like if your product sucks, you don't even get a seat at the table at this point.

Yeah. There's too many, there's too many things out there, like G2 crowd and those types of things where people can do a simple Google search and find, nope, this product sucks. And you don't literally don't even get invited. So to me, it's table stakes that your product has to work and you have to have a decent customer success. Right. And, and, you know, going back to, to gong, you know, their nexus, which you, which is, it doesn't matter what you sell. It matters how you sell. Right. Which I fundamentally believe in that, but, but I also, I, I, I am also seeing if you follow a challenger sale, right? By the time somebody comes to us, they're already 60 to 70% of the way through the sales process.

And, and also G2 crowd themselves, like I trained you to crowd and I realized, and I found out that they have the top 250th most traffic website on the internet. Wow. Like think about, and they're trying to go top 100. They're, they're trying to break into the top 100. Think about that for a second, like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and you have a B2B review website being the top 250th most. So obviously clients are doing a ton more research on us before, before we own them. And then content marketing and driving all this other stuff, account-based, account-based marketing. Now, the way I look at it is I personally think that when that, like, if we're going to spend all that money to drive that inbound lead and SEO and all that other stuff, the last, like right now, unfortunately, the SDR role, like the, in the inbound SDR role is the entree to sales.

Which, okay, it's easy for the sales rep because it's taking people who are interested in your product and you don't have, so it's a nice intro for the sales rep, but it's a miserable experience for the client. Because if you are genuinely 60 to 70% of the way through the sales process, do you want to talk to some 22-year-old, wet-behind-the-air, piss-ant little kid that's going to ask you fucking bant questions? Are you out of your fucking mind? Like, I want to talk to somebody who knows what the fuck they're talking about, right? So I actually see that the inbound role moving upstream pretty high. Like, I actually think it's become more of a customer success role and less of a sales role, more of a base versus commission.

And so I guess I'm wondering, where does that leave, like, talk to me about where you see, like, the intro sales role being at this point with this evolution right now. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I think there's always, there's always going to be a place for the really high-skill outbound hunter, right? You know, because especially, people don't know what they don't know, right? I mean, yeah, there's a lot of buyers who are looking. But, I mean, in the early days for PostBeyond, as when markets are more immature, you know, you need those people that can create that spark and tell that story and evangelize, right? So there's always... The product sales itself is full of shit. I'll take that back.

I love these companies, and I know, you know, I don't want to call them out, but there's plenty of companies out there that pride themselves on not having a sales team. It's like, yeah, come to me in about a fucking year when you hit the wall, pal, okay? Because eventually, that inbound lead and that seed and grow approach is going to level off, and now you've got to go upstream. And the only real way to do that is to go upstream and start hunting, right? So I agree with that. But do you think there's going to be a relatively major shift here as far as the sales reps' role in all of this? Yeah, I mean, definitely, you know, the point you're getting at in terms of sales and customer success blending.

I think what is going to happen, I mean, sales has to be extremely close to product, right? That's the name of the game. I mean, maybe there's some new roles that pop up that are specific to that. I think, you know, sales engineer type thing, like, but new age, I know there's, it also sort of depends on what type of business a company is trying to build, right? Like, the whole no sales thing, you know, if you really are, if it's a low ACV type of business and, you know, maybe, you know, you can get by. There's lots of examples of businesses that, you know, have gone sort of no touch. And, you know, with a product like an app queues or, you know, Drift or Intercom or these different things, you can have that human touch and have the sales intercept when it's needed.

But, you know, I mean, I'm sure you buy, you've bought lots of software in the last couple of years too, right? Like, or at least I have. And I love, the modern buyer wants to be in control and wants to get to a point where they feel like, you know, okay, I've got the kernel idea and I know that the product works. But now I need help actually figuring out how to stand it up, right? And that's where, that's where sales is never, you know, I guess what I'm trying to say is, you know, the onus is going to be on the salesperson to get more and more consultative and to be more of an expert in both product and CS, right? And figuring out how to be extremely prescriptive with how, first of all, deeply understanding, you know, looking at the product analytics.

So looking at, okay, in a free trial, how has the, how has that user used the product? What are the different features that they've looked at? What is, you know, what role are they in? What type of business are they in? What are they trying to achieve? And then putting all those pieces together and then painting a very clear picture for that buyer on, you know, why they should, if they're, if the buyer is not completely sold based on the product experience, then, you know, being that consultative seller and being very prescriptive and tying all those different pieces together to ultimately close. So, so how do you coach the, or, I mean, I know, again, you've only been there for a couple months here, but with the, with the companies that you invest in, cause I always, I, I, I, I believe the product centric thing is, is, is happening.

Yep. I also believe customer success is, is, I don't believe it. I'm watching it happen, becoming a much more strategic part of most organizations. Um, so when, when do you think, um, companies should invest, like really invest in, say you've got a product, right. That kicks ass. Okay. Uh, you guys have invested in them. They're a series B, series C, whatever it is. Um, when, when do you, when do they, when should they really start focusing on sales, right. And, and getting, and, and building the set, like hire their first VP of sales, for instance, you know what I mean? You got a founder. I firmly believe that founders should be the ones originally to sell their product. Cause they have to know how to sell it.

But the problem with that, that I see with founders is they, they, even the, even the most introverted engineer you'll ever come across in your life. Okay. Who doesn't think they're in sales in any way, shape or form. Yep. They create something and they go out there. I always say that sales is the transfer of enthusiasm, right? It's, it is, it's just fundamentally because, because when you're passionate about something, people gravitate towards you. Right. So, so a founder who is not a salesperson, but, but believes in what they're doing, right. Goes out and their first, their first conversations are with usually friends, families, and fools. Right. Like they're, they're, they're close ecosystem.

So they're, they're passionate and they're speaking to a friendly audience. Yep. So then they're kind of like, Oh, well shit, this stuff's easy. Like, wow, we got like, let's just hire a bunch of sales reps and fucking throw them to the wind. Right. Yeah. And then because there's no structure, there's no process or any of that stuff, the sales reps fail. And then the engineer's like, Oh, see, I knew it. You know, sales reps suck. So let me go the marketing route. Right. And now let me dump a whole shitload of money into marketing with inbound lead generation. Cause my sales reps probably kind of suck. So I'm going to go marketing route this way. Yeah. And they kind of stumble through all the, and make a lot of mistakes and waste a lot of money.

Yeah. So I guess if for, for what you are seeing out there or what you've seen is as a former founder and as somebody now who's on the other side, I guess what's, and again, you know, preface this with, it depends on what you sell and who you sell to. Right. That shit. But, um, but like, what's that, what's that mix there? Is it, is it, do you bring sales in super early? Say, do you bring a, like a experienced VP of sales in, or do you bring a grinder in first just to go figure it out and partner up with the founder? Like what, what, what have you seen to be kind of a successful formula, if you will? Yeah. I mean, I think, um, if you sort of break it down by stage, I really like, you know, the early stage, I told, I could not agree more about, you know, the founder led selling, um, say to the first, you know, five, even, even 10 million in revenue type thing.

Like the, the CEO obviously being, um, would be involved again, depending on their skillset. But, um, you know, I really like in the early days, um, I mean, definitely the VP of sales thing is, uh, is scary, you know, sub, I would say sub 40 people, uh, the VP of sales is pretty scary, um, but you also have to look at the economics, like what, what type of business are you trying to build? Right. So what's, you know, the, uh, if you've got a really solid product that you've proven can be sticky and, you know, uh, you can get some virality, whatever it is, you know, that you're, um, I mean, ultimately, can you get your users to see value such that, um, they're telling people about it, right. That's, uh, you know, sort of a key measure measure of success in the early days.

And then, um, I think you, you have to be a little bit formulaic about, um, once you've gotten to a certain stage and you've proven both, you know, the product stickiness and you've proven that you can run a sales process with, you know, a few initial AEs who are, who are gritty and can, um, you know, can get deals done on a repeatable basis. Then I think you have to look at, you know, yeah, I mean, are you trying to raise capital and really go out of market aggressively? And if so, you know, where do you think you can get in 12 months, 24 months? And then you can, you essentially just put the pieces together, um, based on, you know, how big is, uh, how big are your average deal sizes? Um, all, all this, you know, sort of typical stuff in terms of running numbers.

But I think that's super important, especially if you're going to raise money, um, you have to be really specific about, you know, how much money are you going to raise? You can't just say, oh, you know, five to $10 million, right? As a founder, you have to, um, get to a point where you're very clear on, um, where you think the business can go and why, um, and, you know, get to a point where you have a clear idea of what the team is that you need in place over the next 12 to 24 months to hit the goals that you're setting out, right? Cause if, you know, if someone's going to give you money, it's because you're committing to the fact that you're going to try to get a business from A to B in terms of revenue and growth and usage.

Um, so I think it's, you know, and, and the other thing I would say is, um, don't reinvent the wheel, learn from businesses that, uh, are running similar, you know, go to market and product models that you are, um, and look at when they hired their VP of sales and, you know, when, how did they, um, structure and scale that up, right? You know, hiring in, um, I forget what the sort of rule of thumb is, but, you know, hire one rep, then hire three reps, then hire six rep, you know, try to do it in buckets rather than adding, you know, one AE here and one AE there. Um, so you can get some, some scale and repeatability out of it. And that's where things like, um, sales ops and sales enablement start to become important as you scale, right?

Because, um, you know, having the data layer in place to understand, okay, if, as you're hiring all these reps and as you're hiring this VP of sales, you know, are your deal cycle shrinking? Um, you know, are your ACVs going up? Um, how do you really make sure that you have, you can diagnose the health of the business and the health of the sales team as you grow. And if you, if you try to scale before having a lot of that stuff figured out, you run the risk of hiring a bunch of reps and having them fall flat. Like sales enablement too, is such a, it's such a hard thing to get right early. And so that's why, you know, you need, you kind of need a maverick person who can do, um, or a couple of people that can do ops and enablement really, really well, um, early.

I can't stress, you know, if you can find those people, hire them as soon as you can, because, um, they're really the glue that ties a lot of that thing, a lot of that, uh, go to market motion together. Yeah. It's funny. You know, one of the things I've learned over the years, um, just based on, you know, experience and seeing a bunch of shit, it's pretty liberating when you figure out where you fit in the, in the, in the, in the grand scheme of things. Right. In the sense that there are some people that are absolutely fantastic from zero to 10 million, right. The chaos, like, well, I'll take that back. There's, there's a, there's only a certain type of people and I'm not one of them that is, that is a true founder in the sense that the, the ultimate risk taker, the person that says, fuck it.

I got no money right now. I'm going to go live on my parents' fucking couch. Uh, I'm going to eat ramen noodles and I'm going to start a business. Cause I had this idea that I genuinely believe in. Right. That that's one person. Yep. And there's the person like me, which is, I'm all, I always tell people I'm the second guy in, right. You, you come up with an idea that has some traction. Then you bring me in and I will put gas on that fire and take this thing to the next level. And then there's the, you know, so then there's, there's kind of like the zero to 10 million. Then there's like the 10 to 50 million person. And there's like the 50 to IPO or whatever that, you know, a hundred and two, whatever that.

And then there's the person past that. Yep. Once you figure out where your skillset fits, it's a, first of all, it's a really liberating thing. And second of all, you can now become almost like a mercenary in the sense that you come into businesses, you find businesses that are at that stage. You, you, you get in and out in two to three years, you do your thing and then you move on. Right. And I'm actually starting to see that a lot more these days. I'm starting to see like that, when you said that enablement role, there's one role. And I wish these people, it always happens to somebody who isn't experienced enough to understand what's happening to them. But it's that, it's that they're growing, you know, companies growing like a weed and they need somebody to manage on boarding.

Right. So they take some poor soul who's, who's really, you know, who's been successful in sale or whatever it is, or, you know, it kind of shows some aptitude for operations and training and those types of things. And they put them in that role as enablement. They almost give them no funding or budget at all. And they tell them you have to ride this bike while building while, you know, this rocket ship. Right. And so they juggle a million things. They try to do what they can. They bring me in to try to stop gap solution on something else. And then about two years of that fucking chaos and nightmare scenario, then the company kind of gets to a point where it's like, you know what we need, we need to hire somebody who's been there, done that at this point.

Then they go and they spend the big dollars on the enablement person who's been there. They give them the big budget and that fucking poor person that just got the shit kicked out of them for two years and begging. Now they have to, they have to educate this new person coming in and that person now takes all the credit because now they have all the budget to do things. Right. So it's, and I, and I see it over and over and over again. So do you see the same thing based on your feedback there? Yeah. I mean, I, I, I feel for that person. And I, I, again, I, it's the kind of thing that until you've been through it and seen that mistake, um, it's an easy thing to overlook, right? I mean, sales training, um, and the work that you do, I mean, there's a reason you have such a successful business, right?

Like sales training and sales enablement, um, is extremely hard to do well. And, um, ultimately it's such a core part of how you scale a business. Um, you know, especially in enterprise sales world, um, enterprise SAS, um, you need to have, you're trying to build an engine and if you don't have, um, you know, the right parts and the right oil to build the engine, um, you're in some trouble and you're going to break down. And so, yeah, I mean, I, I, um, I definitely feel extremely strongly about, you know, making sure you hire, um, expertise in those glue roles, sales ops being another one, um, you know, making sure all of your systems are extremely tuned. And I, uh, I've seen too many super messy, uh, instances of marketing automation and Salesforce, um, setups that, uh, you have to be meticulous about, uh, really having that stuff finally tuned, uh, as soon as you possibly can.

Um, if you're going to, you know, avoid as many headaches as possible down the line, there's always going to be headaches, but, um, try to get that stuff set up and get the right people in place early. And it's almost like you want to, uh, you know, I wish there was like almost like a checklist for founders that if you're going to start a company, like you have these bare minimum things in place, because a lot of that, that, that guts of like a CRM system, you know, contact information, a good, you know, marketing, whatever those pieces are to your point, like there becomes a point where it becomes untenable, right? Like you almost have to throw the baby out with the bathwater at a certain stage, if you haven't, you know, cleaned it up or, I mean, and that, that happened to me, you know what I mean?

Like our, our Salesforce instance is a disaster. Yeah. I mean, the amount of shit that's in my Salesforce right now is like, and it just got to the point where after a while I was like, you know what? Fuck it. Like I can't clean it up. So let's just like, let's just focus on the stuff that matters here. Um, but man, I, there's one piece of advice that I wish I took early on in my, in my, uh, building this thing out, which was my former predecessor, Jeff Hoffman. He said, do you know, we'll collect every single person's name you ever come in contact with and their contact information and get them in your database so that you know exactly. Right. Cause, cause, and, and I, and I was like, yeah, yeah, sure.

And so I, you know, I put signup forms on my website, you know, that type of stuff. But if I had been like really, really focused on, on collecting data on every single person I've been in contact, like my list right now, my email list is probably, I don't know, 20,000, 30, you know, something like that should be 200,000. You know what I mean? And there's leverage, right? There's, there's like, now you can do stuff with that. But I, but I was so busy trying to make money and try to, you know, keep the business afloat that those small detailed things that most people like regret after the fact, but they don't understand the importance of it while they're going through it. So it's, I think that's, that's where like a partner like you, for instance, comes in to say, Hey, yeah, good job, but make sure you get this shit in order here or else you're going to hit a brick wall in about a year.

Right. Yeah, well, you got 335,000 on LinkedIn, so you're doing all right. That's sad. I think that was just going to be in the right place at the right time. Talk to me or tell the audience a little bit about where, where they can find out more information about you guys, if they're interested also in, in kind of what you're doing personally, because, because again, you have a very unique role within kind of that, this VC firm that I think a lot of people might be interested in learning about. So, so how can they learn more? Where should they go? That type of stuff. For sure. Yeah, no, um, again, appreciate the conversation. This has been a lot of fun and, uh, when we could be doing this for hours, so we're going to have to get a beer at some point soon.

But, uh, yeah, I mean, easiest way to keep in touch with me is, um, through LinkedIn and Twitter. So, uh, at Evan Lewis underscore on Twitter. Um, and yeah, feel free to, you know, if you took anything out of this episode, uh, if there's specific nuggets, uh, JB nuggets, I know that's, uh, his signature. Um, hopefully I provided a few today, but, um, yeah, shoot me, shoot me a note on LinkedIn. Um, you know, georgianpartners.com. You're going to see, uh, a lot of my work start to trickle into, um, into that. So we're in the midst of, um, I mean, like I said, it's two and a half months into a brand new program that I'm building, um, all about trying to figure out how we, um, add value in a scalable way to, uh, typically companies sort of in and around the series a, um, type of stage.

So, um, if you're a series, a founder product leader, sales leader, and, uh, you want to chat, um, always open to, to new connections. And, um, yeah, I just want to say thanks again, John, for the time. No, I appreciate it. Yeah. And it's actually funny. You bring up the grab a beer. Like I've been toying around with the idea of like doing a, a drunken podcast where it's like, you know, you know, like, uh, you know, like drunken history. Have you ever watched Duncan? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All of that show, they get shithouse hammered and they just start talking about like super smart people, like just get hammered. I want to personally do a stoner one where we get, I don't necessarily know if we're ready for that yet, but like, I, I would, I am dreaming.

I'm done. And this is the first time anybody other than my, my partners, uh, I've told about this, which is, I am dying to do a stoner interview series on sales where you have to get stoned while we talk. And I want to see where the conversation goes. So one of the things like, once I get to the point where I like, I've gotten to the point of my career where I genuinely don't give a fuck what people like, I mean, like, I don't really care. I run my own business. Like, if you don't like me, don't like me. Like, I don't really fucking care, but I still do care a little bit. You know what I mean? And so, but once I really reached the, I don't give a shit factor here, you're going to see a stoner podcast series.

Well, keep me posted on the launch of that. And also a quick plug for your new book. Cause I'm super excited for you on that initiative. That's, uh, that's awesome. You said September 10th, it's launching September 10th on Amazon. Yeah. I want to be in, and you can actually go to it now. You can go to, I want to be in sales when I grow up.com. Um, and that one is, um, you know, that's to, that's to make a bigger difference. Uh, it's, it's, it's, it's not Jay Barrows. I mean, obviously I'm going to benefit from it as it gets out there, but this is to, to try to introduce kids into sales at an early age. Uh, so it's not the default profession. Uh, it's about, it's about getting women into sales and a hundred percent of the profits go to charity.

So, uh, so I'm, I'm really hoping this thing, you know, just, I'm hoping this thing takes off. So I appreciate you bringing that up, man. For sure, man. Well, I will, uh, I'll give it a push and, um, yeah, again, thanks. Thanks for the time and, uh, keep up the great work. Looking forward to seeing you soon. Likewise, brother. Talk to you soon. Take care. Cheers. Thank you all very much for, uh, joining us. Hopefully you got as much, you know, hopefully you got as much out of this as I did. And like I said, I always say, uh, if you do nothing else today, go make somebody happy. Right. If you make somebody smile today, you know, you had a good day. So have a great weekend. Let's make it happen.

Thanks.