Latest / Growth After Headcount / Using AI to Take Sales Offline — Adit Trivedi (hyperGTM) #013

Transcript

Using AI to Take Sales Offline — Adit Trivedi (hyperGTM) #013 · Growth After Headcount

• Haris: What if the best use of AI in sales is getting people to meet offline? Today I'm joined by Adit Trivedi, co-founder and CEO of Hyper Go to Market. He shares how a signed vinyl from LL Cool J got the senior executives' attention, how his nine person team works with just two engineers, and why he tries things manually before automating them. We also get into the mistakes behind those precisions and why being able to build faster doesn't mean you should build more. Let's get into it. Hey Ali, welcome to Grove After Headcount. How are you doing today? Adit Trivedi: I'm good, I'm very good, how about you? Haris: I'm good as well. tell us what are you doing at Hyper GTM? Adit Trivedi: Yes, I'm the co-founder and CEO of HyperGTM. We're building the world's first infrastructure for offline marking, specifically to help you land and expand inside your most strategic accounts. Haris: Let's maybe go a more into detail. how do you define offline marketing? Adit Trivedi: Yeah, so in anything to do with in real life. So we have an intelligence layer that identifies when these accounts are nearing a buying window. And a set of agents that find multiple ways to build relationships with them, where they're going to be in the world and what their personal interests, likes and hobbies and existing customers that could be able to connect you with them all through unstructured data. And then we launch high touch experiences in the form of personalized gifting, in-person events, and VIP experiences. Haris: That's I think I find it very fascinating because in this world of AI everything is turning digital and even more digital and you are leveraging AI to go offline. Adit Trivedi: Yeah, so it's a really, really good point. AI has effectively solved the coding issue. anyone really with a half a brain can... work with chat to, to, and Claude to launch a product. Most sophisticated businesses, I know their engineers are abusing Claude or Codex to, to, to build out their, their software and just sense checking over it, which means that it's a lot faster to build. Now when, where software is now solved problem in layman's terms, that means you have more software. But when you look at go to market. If you have more software, you have an excess of supply side, but it's not like you have an excess or an exponentially growing demand side. That actually stays fixed. So, where you have this excess demand side going off to the supply side. all of the channels that are traditionally done to get in front of these businesses start getting hammered. So you start to see things like email and cold calling and content and ads. You start seeing more and more and more of it. Haris: Mm-hmm. Adit Trivedi: From a demand side, when you're seeing more and more of it, you get less attuned to even wanting to see it. So, even to a point where you get turned off from it. So because they're hammering the same channels, it's like trying to find what was, or trying to show the needle in the haystack. It's now trying to show a needle in exponentially growing haystacks. So your chances of being seen, let alone that person in reading the thing, picking up your phone, clicking the thing, goes from ineffective to not plausible to not possible. And so how do you flip the script and meet these strategic accounts where they are? And we're starting to see that with an influx of events, an influx of in-reel lifestyle happening. So we're leveraging that tidal wave. Haris: I think there were so many good points that you just mentioned and I think like fr already from the sound of it, like you sound like you were decades in go to market, but your background is actually from computer science, right? And then you also had the previous company Lingumi, which was also in a very different space. Adit Trivedi: Yeah, no it's true. So when I was younger I didn't really know what I wanted to do and I used to get in trouble a lot. school and outside of school. And so I almost got in a fight with my IT teacher and he, I'd already been suspended a few times and he was like, you've got all of this energy you're putting into bad things. Can I teach you something? And I was like, yeah, for sure. What have I got? if I didn't then he would have went to the head teacher and I think I probably would have got expelled and that wouldn't have been a good look so he I had to agree I had no choice and then he taught me how to code and it was the first time I felt this sense of excess energy being put into something and I enjoyed it and hours flew by knew that's what I wanted to do at uni and then at uni I built a ton of projects just for the hell of it based on problems that I was facing. One was a retail trading app because I thought I could be a multi-billionaire trading the financial markets. Haris: Mm-hmm. Adit Trivedi: I couldn't. And then I built a robot kitchen cleaner because I hated doing chores. built a heads up car display to try and connect people that are driving because when I was driving, I was feeling quite lonely because I was on the road a lot. So I've always just tried to build things based on problems I'm facing. And then actually when I left uni, I didn't know what to do. And I'd been headhunted for this program called Entrepreneur First. This was, I think they're on EF 25 or EF 30 or something now, but this was EF five, so their fifth cohort. And I'd been headhunted into this program and I had met someone on the course called Toby, super intelligent guy. And he had taught English to kids in Russia and Italy in classroom settings, but found it was quite ineffective because every child learns differently. So if you could Haris: Mm-hmm. Adit Trivedi: machine learning and technology to identify how these individual learns and then gives them a one-off-one experience. You could actually teach at scale. And so that's what we did. And I started off as CTO, but truth be told, I was never the best engineer. Like if you read my code back then, you would be like, none of this makes sense. How does this work? I just had this never- give up mindset. And then I eventually moved to a COO role because we hired far better engineers than myself scaling the company. And that took me all around the world. We had a major base of users and customers in China, Taiwan, Singapore, Germany, of all places, South America. it became this thing that grew much. bigger than I'd ever thought it could be. But back then I had always had this David V. Goliath mindset. And so that works well at the beginning when it's just you and a couple others is like solo mavericks. Doesn't work so well when you have a team. And I probably wasn't at the right maturities that to even run a successful company. So I'd left that business. a few, like a year and a half before it got acquired. I then went on to think about what else I could do. And truth be told, like I rushed into the next company. I was like, when I go again, I have a point to prove me, me, me. And. I got introduced to a potential co-founder who was CTO. We wanted to solve the problem of employee engagement for remote teams. Turns out that no one likes filling in forms. And when people feel like they're forced to do something like a lot of these employee engagement tours do, Haris: Yeah. Adit Trivedi: a pre-agent era. I really works. So we then closed that down. I then tried to spin up a few different ideas. One was a design review system and we had some customers, but it reminded me of B2C because in B2C, which the first company was, and that grew to millions of users and customers. You put in all this work and you're limited to 10 euros a month. And then when we went on to the B2B side and we were selling these design review systems to design review agencies, it was $10 per license per month. And I was like, the economies of scale to really get this to like a really big business is really slim to none. And so we dropped that. And it was through that period where I was then trying to connect with these strategic accounts of bigger companies trying to speak to the design teams, nothing was working. And so I remember I was stuck in a... stuck between a rock and a hard place. I think that's the saying anyways, where I had one engineer on the team and he was auto updating to GitHub. So he wasn't even doing work and I couldn't even get hold of him. So I was like, who do I, who do I call? What do I do? I'm in this predicament. I really want to solve this problem and have a bit of money in the bank, but it's nothing's what can I do? So I ended up. been like, need to get rid of this guy, but if I get rid of him, then I'm stuck. I hadn't coded bear in mind for four or five years. weren't in this era. This Haris: Mm. Adit Trivedi: was two and a half years ago, just three years ago. And so I was through LinkedIn and I was like, who do I know? Who do I know? And then two and a half hours in stumbled across this name called Rashid Wahab. Now he was a very, very good friend of mine in university. And I'd seen he'd been contracting. And I was like, I haven't spoken to him for a couple of years. He was a good friend of mine. I just went off the radar. how do I approach him? I just sent him a message being like, hey, long time, da, da, da, da, I would love to speak. And we ended up speaking for a couple of hours. And he had agreed to help me through this transition. If we managed to get a couple of early customers, then he'd be a co-founder. We'd go at this even splits. And so then we started looking more in depth on the problem on how do you start to connect a buyer and a seller. And how do you do that in a world which is just getting pummeled online? So we've then it arrayed through a few solutions. Like the first was a language market fix solution. I are most people send really crap outreach. So it's been, it must be Haris: Yeah. Adit Trivedi: the language and managed to get in a few early customers, but I could bring in people. He could build the thing, but there was no real domain expertise in what we were trying to solve. four. And so we had this friend called Mohammed and Mohammed is a scientist philosopher by trade and is really a deep rooted first-orders principle thinker and I think they make the best products period. They're think about Haris: Yeah, you need those people. Adit Trivedi: it deeply. Yeah and so I remember we were speaking with him and he was building an SEO tool called Hyper SEO with rash on the side, see if it could work. And I told him, there's a much bigger problem here to solve. If we can solve this, we're going to build a really ginormous business. And so after multiple conversations and then he started working together on the side and we're like, Should we carry this on? were getting customers. Now these early design partners were sticking. And so... We were like, should we do this? And then he had a life event occur. I won't make it obvious on a podcast, but he had a life event and he was like, look, something's just happened. It's really positive news, but I need something a bit more stable. I've, he was doing, enterprise sales for a start-up, but prior to that, he, he'd always been doing enterprise sales, in the legal tech before this. then, and then for this company selling to, energy companies and, I was like, look, we've got a big, massive opportunity here and something that we could all leave a legacy for our kids and their kids and their kids behind. he'd come back two, three weeks later and he was like, I thought about what you said, let's do this. So then we raised Haris: Mm-hmm. Adit Trivedi: a very small pre-seed round from a couple of funds in space of like three, four weeks. And then we got going, but it still wasn't smooth sailing then because the solution we had. It wasn't sticky enough. And it was the outcomes, right? People expect, right, if you're building this thing to connect buyers and sellers, what does that mean? Well, there has to be means that take place in order to validate whether what you're doing is working or not. Just so happened in March through one of the investors, they introduced us to a series B company and they were doing this thing called account-based marketing. And we were like, what is this account-based marketing thing? And they were going through what they were doing and realized if we had tweaked some of our agents, they could actually cover these workflows. And... we realized it worked and then we started seeing, they're doing this thing called gifting, but they were doing this very one to many approach, like sending pinball machines that were branded and selling stuff you could get on Reach Test or Sendoso, but. We had realized that, hang on a minute, in a worsening economy, you have multiple local suppliers around the world that's ever grown. Like more and more people are doing side hustles. And so you see that in the number of eBay stores, Etsy stores, et cetera, opening. So like, huh, this is really interesting. All of these suppliers are based all around the world. Actually, you could send any gift. And we had already had the intelligence layer vary in its early stages to understand like, what individuals were interested in and liked and their hobbies and were like, can we map an insight to an actual like personalized gift? And we were like, we can, so we built it. And then we just kept going from there, just focused on design partners, focused on ICP. It got to December of last year and we're getting more early stage companies through the door. We don't work with early stage businesses anymore and I'll get to it, but we're getting to, we're working with early stage companies and I kept botching deals. I could bring people in, but I'd really try and rush the process. I don't think I'd make a strong AE in that sense. I can rip through Top of Fund like No Tomorrow. I can get in rooms and connect with people like No Tomorrow. But I couldn't do this. We brought on our founding AE who's still with us today, who's doing an excellent job to cover the AE bits. And then one thing that taught us is we should experience the problems ourselves. And then we should hire based on the problems rather than this hypothetical anticipation of we need this person, the business is growing. Well, how do you need who you know, if haven't experienced the pain, just like a customer, how do they know if they need a solution if they haven't experienced the pain? Haris: Yeah, yeah. Adit Trivedi: especially if they're paying for it. But we knew this type of thing had worked because we had run for one of the investors that were throwing an LP event. LPs are like investors in a fund and they were throwing a party and so we did this gift idea at this party for all of the LPs and seeing all of their reactions to some of the insights that were found and the conversations that were starting, we knew we were onto something because of the emotions I had sparked in that room. And so we just kept going from there. now we work with some of the world's today, some of the world's biggest enterprises and scale-ups on their account-based management practices. Haris: that's super interesting. And those gifts to the P yeah LMs, what was it again? The app. Adit Trivedi: It's for LPs. So it's for a fund who had invested in us. They throwing an LP party. Haris: Okay. And so to imagine like maybe for the listener, so it's a platform that can provide send gifts on behalf of the companies to potential prospects, right? Adit Trivedi: It's a lot more than that. So first thing is it's not a platform. I think a platform and offering a platform is a very, as one of our investors put it, a very web 2.0 mindset. We live in a world where there's agents, right? And agents can do tasks and you can pair or put chain agents together to do workflows, which means that you can actually take off work from customers by getting the agents to do the work. So our agents live inside Slack, Google chat, team, WebEx, and also your CRMs. And we have an intelligence layer where we offer five to six agents that do a number of things to identify these accounts that are nearing a buying window, to identify events and conferences that they should be attending, to identify opportunities with movements in champions or movements within a customer account. and then to launch these high touch experiences in the form of personalized gifting, in-person events, and getting their meetings booked prior to the event starting, and VIP experiences and executive dinners. So those are the experiences we offer, but it's powered by the intelligence that gets offered. And Haris: Mm-hmm. Adit Trivedi: one thing which has been a second order effect, which has been fascinating to see is, ABM works. But it only works when sales and marketing are in alignment. Haris: Yeah. Adit Trivedi: And oftentimes they're not. marketing pass over leads where they're not nearing the buying window. So sales cycles don't move anywhere. The salespeople get pissed off or they're in a buying window and it's too late specifically on the enterprise. And so again, they're too late to the party. So sales cycles really don't go anywhere. So sales end up doing their own thing. So you have this disjointedness between marketing and sales. So this underlying system that we've created has actually unified sales and marketing because the intelligence enables marketing to send across and the experiences to send across leads that actually move into sales qualified pipeline. And that's been a massive game changer. But the only way we know this is because of how close we are to our customers. We have account managers, humans that are in these channels every day. Haris: Yeah, nowadays we need to point out humans. Adit Trivedi: Yeah, yeah, exactly. We have humans that are in these Slack channels that talk to our customers every week to identify the pains, the new pains that they might have, new use cases. And so we don't treat our customers like a vendor or buyer relationship. We treat them as actual partners because without them, we wouldn't be where we are. And without us, they wouldn't be where we are. So we've got into a nice position where we really see our customers as true partnerships that we build. But the reason that this works is because you can now, ABM is finally scalable, right? Like previously you had to have humans doing all of these things. Like even just take the nuance of one experience and the gifting. You'd have to research these accounts, research these individuals, find an insight, work out a gift, figure out who the hell is gonna make this gift. Then you've got to order the gift but when you order the gift you've got to send it to the right address so you need to work out where that person office is going to be based in. Then you need to send it, then you need to track it, then you need to tie it to a campaign, then you need to set up a sequence on a CRM like a HubSpot or Salesforce to be like right we're gonna call them, we're gonna email them, we're gonna LinkedIn them and we're gonna do this three times over. But even then it's like, right, if the accounts not nearing the buying window, what do you do? And that's our focus, right? The nearing the buying window, because when Haris: Yeah. Adit Trivedi: these enterprises are in market, it's too late. You're having to build relationships with five to sometimes up to 21 individuals. So you're too late. And when they're not nearing a buying window, doesn't move anywhere. So how do you use unstructured data to then identify what these signals are? And it's different for every company. and it's much more nuanced than hiring, firing, and job announcements. Haris: yeah. I think fang super fascinating do maybe we have an example of one very original event or gift that was to cl create a major Adit Trivedi: Yes. Haris: surprise. Adit Trivedi: Yeah, so the CROF of Fortune 200 Company, our agents found that he once built a business with lifelong friend and rapper Lil' Koojay. And in an archived Grammy interview, he mentioned his favorite song. So our agents sourced and sent him a signed vinyl of that song with the inscription Boom Dizzle, because Boom Dizzle is the name of his previous company. That's what we call one of one true personalized gifting. Haris: Wow, I must imagine like I imagine right now when he opens this he must be like what the fu? Adit Trivedi: Yeah, I got an email from this C-level saying, I opened this, I looked at my EA, I looked out and I looked up and I burst into laughter. I have to speak with you. What's your number? Let's get 10 minutes in the diary. Haris: That's amazing. That was for you for you. You sent that gift or was it okay, wow. Adit Trivedi: Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's also how we validate the one-of-one gifting approach. I was like, well, if this works, why don't we just try it on us for ourselves and target. Haris: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it gets you a super user of your own product. Adit Trivedi: We have to be like, even for our own go-to-market motion, the events we attend, the people we reach out to, the accounts we reach out to, the approach of the experiences, that's all we do. Like our version of pipeline generation is going to these conferences, targeting these booth owners that are nearing a buying window. coming with these snapshot GIFs, are like GIF notes, which are branded, which has a custom QR code, which shows them what the GIFT is. And yeah, it works really well. Haris: I think that's also probably why we met at the conference. You were sent Adit Trivedi: Yes. Haris: there. And now going more towards your own operation, like how I know the answer is going to be very different, but what are for you the biggest differences when building Lingumi and now Hyper GTM, like in this new AI native world? Like, how do you see that? Adit Trivedi: so different right in in ninjumi this was back in what 2016 i think 2015 2016 the world as we knew it was super different you had to have front end and back end engineers or four stack engineers that could do both with b2c you had to rely on performance mocking once you hit a certain scale. We built the offline community piece with parents and kids. And we used to do these little, this tripped our memory name, we used to do these little road shows where we'd have teachers in the app do these little shows with parents and kids and went crazy in Taiwan and China. I think like, back then you had to have a big team to accomplish big numbers and there are obviously a few edge cases like a WhatsApp and Instagram but by and large you had to have a large headcount and a lot of the headcount was spent doing things that now agents can do so we're a team of nine Our engineering function is only two people. It's our CTO and our founding engineer. Founding engineer has been with us for a year and a half now coming up to two years. So on the engineering side, I don't think you need that many people because engineering is a solved problem. And I think this is what a lot of AI companies get wrong. It's like, just because you can build a lot faster doesn't mean you should build more things horizontally. I understand the vertical aspect of going deeper into the workflows you built for your customers to deliver more value. But the analogy I give, it's like almost like when you go to a restaurant and they have a book as a menu and that's ever expanding. They're never gonna and every anything you order is just going to be mediocre compared to a Michelin star restaurant where you have a single page 15 items but those 15 items are built and made with precision, accuracy and taste and that's all they focus on. And so I think this is where a lot of air companies are getting it wrong, is just because you can build more doesn't mean you should. And I think the innovation doesn't like our product is innovative for short, but our go-to-market approach is innovative. And I think the companies that win at least from the zero to one, five million stage have to be innovative in their go-to-market approach and have to look to build relationships. So going back to your question, what's different now is we have humans doing the human things. Like we will have more account managers, we'll have more sellers in the terms of AEs and... and those that also do top funnel like me. And we'll have AEs that do top funnel and take deals all the way to pilots and other places. We'll have account managers who spend time with our customers because again, you can think an early stage startup, cool, you can move at the speed of light with everything that's changing in AI. When you're a corporate or a Fortune 2000 company, have tens of thousands, if not a hundred thousands of employees. You structurally can't keep up with the pace of change. It's super scary. How do you ensure that you're not left behind? Well, you need to be working with companies and vendors that can handhold you through these processes and changes. So I think in order to succeed humans become more human because you have agents that can do a lot of the things humans didn't want to do to begin with. And even internally, well, we're just nine people and by early I think will be 11 people. By adding another AE, which we're actively hiring for now, and another account manager, you can surround your team with agents to then supercharge them. Haris: Yeah. Adit Trivedi: So our view is how can you get one person surrounded by agents to do the work of 10, 15, 20? So our CTO spends a lot of time not only on customer stuff, but also internal. How can we make the team more effective? How can we develop their Ironman suit, so to speak? Because the more effective we can make our internal team, the more impact we can have with our customers and prospective customers. Haris: No. So on that analogy, imagine now from today to tomorrow you double your customer base. Could you handle it with the existing team? Adit Trivedi: sure, yeah of course. We... It's too subtle. I don't think we need to increase the engineering capacity right now. I think we can add more more omations to enable an account manager to handle more customers. And also the same with deal progression. think when it comes to top of funnels, because we're trying to meet these prospective clients in person, there's only so much that a human can do. I can't ever see enterprise sellers with six, seven, eight, nine figure contracts, or in some case, like one of our customers, 10 figure contracts, being passed to robots to make decisions. I think that bit will always be innately human. And there's only so much one human being can do across a day when when targeting these individuals in person. So I think that linearly scales. But I think the surrounding elements around the research and who we target, how we target them, how we get deals across quicker to pilots and the manual load that needs to be done through demos that get created or proposals that could create and so on and so forth gets handled with AI. But we're still very much an advocate and always have been an advocate. And it's why I think the company is successful right now is that we always manually try and do the thing before automating it away because you don't understand the nuances. And you don't understand the nuances in enterprise sales, you're cooked. Haris: Yeah. I think from how you're speaking is it sounds very reflective and then you really hear the experience from a serial founder, right? You may probably did all the reflections you said now, the wisdom, you probably did all the mistakes before multiple times before arriving here. Adit Trivedi: Yeah, and I still make mistakes. I'm not perfect by any stretch or means. But I think I'm in a much better human headspace building a company now than I was years ago. Because I always had this thing where was like David V. Goliath, me against the world, I'm going to prove a point to everyone. then... you realize that the only person you needed to prove a point to was yourself. And it's because I wasn't doing everything I should have been doing in order to make something a success. So I'm putting those wrongs to rights, but still have a point to prove. But this time it's a point to prove to myself than anyone else that I can build a company, work with a bunch of extraordinary individuals. Our team is insane. This is best team I've ever worked with. And it's definitely a a blessing that we have. I feel very fortunate. And so I also owe it to the team to bring the best version of myself and to our prospective customers. Because if I am not, then we're not bringing in as much pipeline. I'll probably be a nuisance to work with. I know sometimes I can be a nuisance to work with. But it's all a work in progress, for sure. Haris: I think everyone is at some point. And I think this is a good segue towards the end. You already gave so many reflections. But we mentioned also earlier everyone can build, right? Code is becoming a commodity and with half a brain, right? So everyone can spit out a great product and and that's what we are seeing. There's so many people founding a company now. So people just from a business background who maybe in didn't weren't able to found the find a technical co-founder are able to build something. So what advice would you give people who are launching a company nowadays? Adit Trivedi: Yeah, it's funny because I wouldn't have given myself this advice when I was 21 and just wanted to build something even 23, 24 for that matter and 25 but now it's like slow down. Really think about the problem you're solving. Really think about the thesis. Ignore everything you read online. Like I'm sick of seeing system of record for this system of action for that. It's like, what does that even mean to your customers? Like this is all investor VC talk. And most of these VCs have never built a business to save your life. So who are you trying to build a company for? So I think it's really laser down on the problem you have. to solve and go and validate if this is an actual problem. And a free design partner is not validating a problem. It's easy to get people to say yes for free shit. Find a problem that someone is willing to pay you to solve before it's even been built so you know how big of a problem it is for them. Spend time doing the unscalable things and speaking to potential customers. It's funny because it's the same playbook that Paul Graham spoke about years and years ago when he first started YC, he's got a great set of essays called Paul Graham essays, which I think before anyone starts a company should definitely read. think focus on a niche problem. Like it will expand like our cases with our enterprise customers, like the use cases are expanding. If we try to solve everything at once, you become like that restaurant that serves every cuisine and every item and the book pages like 30. pages and you don't know what to pick. Like really niche down, do one thing extremely well, be world class at that and then move to adjacent edge cases. But, also the other thing is don't think like a web 2.0 founder. Like we live Haris: Hmm. Adit Trivedi: in a world of agents like... If these web 2.0 companies could rebuild in an agent-first world, you think they'd be offering a platform. The number of times I speak to prospects and they're like, thank God it's not another software that we have to onboard and learn. It's like in an agent-first area, you can really take work away. I think it's not rocket science, but I think what a lot of media portrays makes it feel really difficult and everyone's raising left, right and center. And the final piece. most businesses don't need to raise VC money. I think in this day and age, it Haris: That's a fact. Adit Trivedi: would be really profitable great businesses like are you building a business for an ego which is fine like a lot of like the companies from back in the 2010 errors and built companies based on massive egos and like that can get you to the billion-dollar outcome but then you get to the outcome and there's a slim chance, you might get to it. And you look back and you're like, why did I even do this? Like this money just doesn't make me happy. So look at what makes you happy. Look at the problem you're looking to solve that makes you want to stay in that problem all day, all night. And it's the only thing you can think of. then think of very easy solutions to get your paid MVP out with people that are willing to pay. If they're not willing to pay then start to check yourself and wonder if you offered the right solution. You might still be on the right problem like we were. Like our first solution wasn't the thing that started working, but we were so possessed over solving this problem that we then got into what the right solution was. Haris: Hm. I think I asked you how to advise for starting a company and I got live advice from you Adit Trivedi: Hahaha! Haris: as I think my lesson is I'm gonna scratch platform for my vocabulary Adit Trivedi: Yeah. Haris: amazing. Thank you very much for being here. And I think this podcast is gonna be very valuable for so many people. And yeah, thanks again for being here. Adit Trivedi: Amazing, thank you so much.