The Day Paddle's Entire Sales Team Quit, And What It Taught Harrison Rose About Building GTM Teams That Last

It's not good enough for me to be, like, good or necessarily even really good. It's like, I want to be the best and then when I become the best or something, I want to be better at every single time I do it and like really redefine what great looks like. Like nothing motivates me more than being told something is not possible and then not only proving them that it's possible, but completely overwhelming them as to how good the thing the answer or the outcome I'm going to deliver is, like I live for it. Welcome to Human First, the go-to-market iron show. I'm your host Danielle Parker and we also have Chris Ganon, founder of Captivate Talent, as our co-host today, live in London. Most founders who have built something extraordinary have a moment that they don't talk about much. The moment where something went badly wrong with the go-to-market team and they have to figure out what exactly they missed. Our guest today talks about that moment openly. The day his entire sales team at paddle quit and what he learned from that is now shaping how he builds a new go-to-market team at GoodFit, especially in the age where AI is making a lot of go-to-market hiring decisions obsolete. Harrison Rose co-founded paddle at 18 and helped scale it to unicorn status. And now he's building GoodFit, a platform designed to answer the question every founder needs to answer before they hire. Who should you actually be selling to? Harrison, thank you so much for joining us today. It's so exciting to see you here in London. So we're gonna get right into it. So you co-founded paddle. The day you got your A-level results at 18, which I'm not even fully sure I know when A-level result is, but when we've got to later. They did not have to be fat. They don't all say it all men. Most people are not hiring anyone, managing anyone, founding a company at that time in their life. So how did you figure that out? How did you figure out what hiring was supposed to look like and leading and managing like what was that like? Yeah, I mean, I probably didn't figure it out for quite a long time, which is maybe maybe the problem. It's interesting. At that age, I didn't know about the world I was walking into, too really. My co-founder Christian had been reading like S1 since he was about seven, whereas I knew nothing about the world, you know, nothing about VC. I didn't know what go-to-market was. But we got started. And then, yeah, there's like the ignorance and arrogance, I guess, of being 18. And if just like, yeah, I can do this. Like, I can work this out. Like, I didn't know you were men at hiring expertise or anything like this. So I think those two things helped me in the early days. But really, I think because I didn't know I could go and hire people or like this expertise existed or even considered whether it existed, I think we didn't hire anyone really or grow a team for a long time. And I think this played itself out throughout the early as a puddle in that I kind of did every role before we hired for it, whether that was BDRing solutions, engineering, account manager, I kind of did everything. And because I guess I must have been thinking from first principles, because all I kind of had. But before I hired anyone to do anything, I kind of needed to work out what I needed them to do. But I think that ended up serving us relatively well. Harrison, hitting that like critical point, I mean, you've mentioned before, like two to three million was roughly where you were at before you found you were in the founder of led sales trap. How did you figure out that was a trap internally? Like, what were the signals you saw? Yeah, I think that increasingly in Europe, I'm here and people talk about the founder led sales trap, but we weren't in motion, capital, it could fit. And they name it something even more disastrous soundering. I wish I could remember off the top of my head. But it's like, where where startups in Europe go to die, like this, two to five million error point, everyone raised a series A and they're struggling to get to the B. And I think it's because a lot of them are falling into this kind of founder led trap where the don't know listening in, right? Like you've been selling via your own network or maybe some VC intros or some credibility and your struggling to grow beyond that. I think we didn't hell have a lot wrong, which I know we're going to talk about today. I think this one we we did less wrong. Because when I think about what are the benefits of being able to sell as a founder, some of it sometimes is like credibility, like second time round, I feel like I've got this a good fit. We absolutely didn't have that. It's like 18 year olds doing this for the first time. Yeah. So payments, I was exactly. And then we we only had raised money from like a little known angel angel investor at the time. He's he's bigger now, but he didn't have any network to introduce us to. And and all these benefits you normally get, I don't think that we had. So we had to find a quite repeatable way to sell the product that was replicable for other quite early people in their careers, because that's kind of who we were. So I think we moved through the two to three million kind of zone relatively OK. It actually hurt us a little bit later down the mind when it was like real, real scale and real resource planning. And we'll talk about things that we could have done better, but like we were growing at 300% year in year in the early years with a very small similar team. And it was only once that caught up with us that everything started to fall apart if that kind of makes sense. So you're in that stage. And being a founder, I know how this is, you've called it founder privilege, like going out to market. How would you, um, you know, we see customers many times that are in that million, two million dollar area. And they're like looking to hand over sales to a rep. And they don't realize like what founder privilege means. Like how would you define that? And like what's to watch out for that proves something's not repeatable? Yeah, like as a founder, you can go into a room. You probably know the domain space better than anyone in the room, probably. Like if you're obsessed with most founders are, right? You can negotiate any price you want. You can commit any feature you want. You can, you can kind of do whatever you want, right? Like a rep absolutely doesn't have have that privilege. They need to sell the product as it exists today. We're very harsh now reps about not committing to features that don't exist or over promising and pricing that normally working within some constraints, too, right? And those things just as a founder, you're like, yeah, constraints, like it's fine. Yeah, yeah. You want to go shoot? We can negotiate, right? Or you know the road map inside out or you know the technical limitations of your product. And what is going to be possible versus not on all of that stuff, you can kind of compete on the fly as a founder and move a deal forward relatively quickly or with confidence that the reps is not going to have. So that I guess is what I call founder privilege. And and the point of which you recognize that it's no longer needed is for me when I think when my friend Andy Lieber shared this as a quote, it's like when you can sell your product without the founder in the room repeatedly, like this is when you don't need founder privilege anymore, right? That's the measures. Like if you weren't in the room or in the sales process, could your rep go and sell this thing in a repeatable way on a repeatable basis without you? And that's what you should kind of be aiming for if that makes sense. One more question, like building that team and hiring you've talked about the day at panel where the whole sales team quit, and you said we could ask this. So we could talk about it. What did you miss or or understand afterwards about those hires and what did you not understand at the time? Yeah. So for some context, we were probably in that two to three million error range at the time. I think we'd raise a series B or we were on our way to I can't remember my name is fuzzy. Had us like, I don't know, 14 years old now, this was relatively early. And yeah, it was brutal. Like I thought we were doing terribly like at the time, like I thought that was better. I just thought we were rubbish. Like I just thought we were doing a terrible job. And we'd set ourselves some really ambitious growth goals. I say we at the time I was allowing our CFO to go and do that. And another lesson that we can talk about later to grow a God knows what way I don't even know. But we were growing and tripling in size every year later that year after the sales team quit, we were going to be named the fastest growing software company in the UK. Yeah, the perception I had and the team had at the time was like, we were failing with a behind target, like everything was going terribly. And such was the fear in those folks that things weren't going to plan. They quit, I guess. And all of them. And again, it wasn't like a walk out, they're going to be wrong. But like, I'm imagining there are like relieving. Yeah, this is going terribly over the space of like three or three months or really four months. Most of that team just kind of kind of left. And I think it taught me a lot about leadership, as well as the cultures you need to build within that team. And on the leadership front, it's like, you can set yourself some really ambitious goals. I still struggle with this at a good fit like my second company now. And miss them, right? But still be be best in class, potentially, you'll be growing really, really quickly. And it's really important your team understands like how well you're doing in and the and the not the only major for that necessarily is the talks you set ourselves like a good fit. We set ourselves some really aggressive growth goals. I think we're probably in the top percentile of growth right now. And maybe you're just falling short of them, but they need to know that. Like again, whatever, maybe you're tripling in size, but you're your goal is to grow faster than that. The fact you're a company tripling in size, you're a new still puts you in a pretty high percentile for growth, right? But they need to understand that difference and you still need to celebrate the wins, even if you're falling short of quite where you want to be. And at that point in time, we weren't taking them on that journey. We weren't celebrating that wins. It was all doom and gloom, despite actually having quite a lot to celebrate probably you missed the the leader has to be the eternal optimist, no matter what. Otherwise, if you can speak it and you can't lay out the path, they won't, we were terrible at this. Like in the ball meeting, the question of getting feedback is just like, you need to do a bad job of just celebrating stuff. And then I think we got pretty like that crazy that your your board was like, can you just be more positive? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think we were getting quite VC-pilled on just like we didn't know we were doing a good job. And like we thought we had to be growing faster and everyone around us when you read the tech crunch articles at the time, felt like they were doing better than us and we would We genuinely thought we weren't doing well, and it's only on reflection now and seeing what paddle became that we were doing a lot of stuff pretty well actually. But yeah, it taught me a lot about how to motivate a manager team, but also how to structure how to structure their targets in comparison to the company targets and maybe we'll get into some of that stuff. How did you take those lessons into how you're building the team now? I know you said you have aggressive goals, but you're stopping to celebrate more. How did it help you was a leader and even in scoping the types of people you want to hire? Yeah, I'm still not great at it, I think, but trying hard to learn in the lesson. Not everyone's walked out the door yet, so maybe that's a positive. For example, at the time, we were running quite a collegiate culture, I'd say. I didn't know what culture was at that point in time really. I didn't know what performance culture was. I didn't know we were running a collegiate culture, but we had a team target. There weren't even individual targets, for example, at that point in time. When the team target, basically, I aligned with the financial panel, the financial target again, a lesson that doesn't always need to be true. Everyone felt like they were failing. Everyone felt like they were doing a bad job because we weren't meeting this company-wide goal that we had to grow at a certain rate. Whereas even basic stuff now, I know that reps need individual targets. You can actually set a pretty aggressive company growth goal, which may be as greater than the sum of your team quota or whatever, and that team can go out and feel like they're succeeding, and they're hitting their number, and they're exceeding performance and the company's falling short. But even that distinction will help them realize that they're doing well. They're in a good place. They've got a place with a problem-market fit, they're earning their money. If they can see that peers around them are also hitting target, but maybe we're just falling short of goals. Already that nuance picture creates the environment to discuss this with the team. You guys are doing brilliantly. We think you're excellent. You're in the right place. You're earning money here. You're happy. We wish we were going a little bit faster, but frankly, we're on a really good stretch. It creates the forum for that discussion, and I think some of it was like culture, and some of it was just basics, like actually saying individual quotas, for example. I think it's leaders, you can have your number, and if you're striving towards that and the team celebrating, you can help drive them towards that number. But if they always feel like they're losing, nobody's going to perform that well. Yeah. Any gives you the ability to celebrate the individual and so on. Especially in a sales role, when you hear no so much, and you have to overcome that all the time, and then it's like, "Oh, you're getting no one deals," and then you're also not celebrating when you do well. Yeah. We had to change the profile of who we were hiring. So around this time, we started to hire in sales leadership. We were in the low millions of error. We had no managers, no nothing. I was managing everyone pre and post sale. As I said, we really learned by doing before we hired anyone who actually knew what they were doing. And yeah, we brought in those leaders and shifted more towards a performance-based culture than a collegiate one. And that sounds a bit counterintuitive, given these people left because they thought that we weren't performing. But it actually created a structures in place to have individuals who wanted to come in and not just be on a rocket ship journey, but wanted to go and be a successfully, wanted to hit a quota. And again, we started to create the conditions to allow individuals to thrive, rather than just be panicking where their company was going. You heard like a communist stick. Yeah. Target. There was just a team quota. And I thought that was normal. Like we were so ignorant. So sure sales. Yeah, exactly. Might have broken. Yeah, Adam came in VP sales at the time and he was just like, "What do you mean? What do you mean?" No, that he's got quotas. I'm like, "Well, there's a target, right?" And he was like, "This isn't how this works." But it was so interesting reflecting on that experience because so much of what we were doing at Paddle was really great and clearly very successful. But because we had no experience, like we didn't know what we were doing, but it was new or unique or innovative. And it created this weird balance of sometimes we would invent really intelligent ways to do things that were really cool and might solve from first principles and not based on how people were doing stuff as they were. Other times we were just doing stuff that was really fucking stupid that actually is just a self-problem. Not to jump too much into Good Fit right away, but your core thesis for Good Fit as a company came from your early days building GTM at Paddle. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, like so as I said, when we started Paddle, nobody knew who we were. We were selling what we now call revenue infrastructure, which is like payments for current billing taxes or all-in-one solution. But nobody knew what that was. Nobody knew what the model was. We charged in a very different way to everyone else and no one was looking for it. To say there was no inbound interest or awareness of Paddle is probably doing it an understatement. Like it would have just been tumbleweed had we not gone out and done stuff. So we recognized pretty early that we needed to go and run outbound sales in order to wear any clients. And this is what I mean. I don't think we had so much of that founder-provid related stuff in the early days. And I don't mean in the context of being in the room doing the deal, but there was no deal flow from VCs or whatever. So we had to go outbound really quickly. And again, trying to solve that problem from first principles, I was like, I sell to software companies. I'm a team of one. There are a lot of software companies out there. How can I prioritize my effort at the software companies that are most likely to buy my product? Because I have a really limited amount of time. How do I direct it at the right folks? And we went on this long journey as to the most effective way to do that, which eventually became good fit and how would you approach it to market, basically? In terms of realizing that you have fit at ICP, what's the difference between a founder who's genuinely done the work and knows that they have an ICP and somebody who just thinks that they have a hypothesis? I think being really harsh most people probably don't. I think they might know what their ICP is, but then they don't actually apply it. And I think it's because if you go and ask a founder what their ICP is, what they actually do, is they go and share with you a bunch of proxies they've been forced to use to describe or to source their ICP or to find those accounts that they want to go and sell to you. So to give you like a bad example, if you ask me at Paddle what my ICP was and I answered it, like I think many founders were going to market this too, I could say, are we selling to the software industry with a head account of 50 to 250 and maybe some other characteristics, I don't know, in India and North America, right? All of those things are objectively true, right? Those would be qualified companies we could sell to, that list of companies is in the tens of thousands and then if I'm the team of one when I first started, where do I start, right? Like that's probably a description of what needs to be true for a company to be qualified for you, not ideal for you, right? And if I really dug in with that founder, what's true about the customers they really want to sell to a really want to win, they often do actually know. And in Paddle's case, it would be like we sell to software companies actually that are selling via a checkout on their site and we really love it when they can be based anywhere actually, but it's really important that their own customer base is global because then they really benefit from our value propositions around currencies, languages, tax, I'm not going to bore people with Paddle's value proposition, but we help people sell globally, right? So people get to that point, it's often, sometimes they don't, but you can get there, but then the real hard step is translating that quality description of what an ideal customer, your ideal customer provolars into something you can actually use and translating that qualitative description into like a set of attributes or fields, you can go source accounts from a whatever is the hard bit where people often fall down. I think that's an interesting distinction to with like qualified versus ideal. And I think a lot of times we think like, I see P when really it's qualified, not like that ideal like, and a lot of people aren't even getting qualified, right? To be fair, it's like it's hard. And it's really hard. Harrison, I have a little bit of a theoretical off script question. So if you had, it's only 10 a.m. Give me a break. Yeah. You want to super garbage? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If you had good fits products, when you were launching back in 2009, Tina, I think it was into the US. How would you have done it differently? I mean, we we half did have good fits product, right? Like a lot of the stuff we built at Paddle, again, it looks very different today. What we're capable of today is very different, but we absolutely had the bare bones of the concept. So I'll talk to you about how we did it. So we were thinking about launching in the US, and we didn't know where to launch, where to put boots on the ground, for example. So what we did was the thing that fucked it up was COVID less over this plan. The plan was fine. And it was the quote like a plans gray, until you get punched in the face. My god, did we get fucking punched in the face? But the plan was really solid. I'm happy to share it. We mapped the market of like every software company in the US, we could sell to you, right? This is qualified software companies with the checkout in the US. And then I was like, okay, cool. But I need to live somewhere like how do I decide where to live? So we mapped them down to how many of them existed in each city, not even state. And then we're like, okay, these are the cities with the highest density of folks that we could sell into. We assume proximity is going to be a good thing. But then we went on a stage further and we looked at what's the amount of international traffic each one of these software companies is getting? And do they currently only support US dollars and English? Or do they already support a set of guarantees, a set of languages, et cetera? And you can start to boil down. Here's the companies in the US that are getting whatever 50% of their traffic from outside of the US, but don't support currently support the euro or the yen or these local payment methods. And these are the folks we should go after first. So we were able to decide who we were going to go after not just based on how many of them were by city, but how many of them there were by city that were ideal, if that makes sense. And as well as some personal preference in there too, to be fair, like the answer to that question was probably somewhere in California. But I still chose New York for other reasons like logistically at paddle. I was still quite involved in operations, time zones, but yeah, that's how we did it. And then COVID fucked everything up basically. - You've trapped a little bit, right? - Yeah, yeah, I moved into my an apartment the day before stay where I'd log down in New York. There were huge keys coming out of Trader Joe's just trying to grab my frozen food. - Harrison, you have a clear view of where the BDR role is going with AI. What's your take on that and how should a founder hire around that role in the future? - For example, learnings around this stuff would have certainly influenced how we went to market in US if I had good fit in some of the technology that we do now. I think people ask this question a lot and it feels quite like triggering to them, I guess, but I think it's simple. Like taking a step back before we talk about the BDR role specifically, I think the thing that we're doing wrong at the moment in going to market whereby we have this new shiny technology called AI available to us is that quite often we're just like tacking AI on to what we've been doing before and assuming that the results are going to be better as opposed to rethinking how we could maybe just do things better, but I think the question people are often relating to us themselves is, is this job that I need to carry out and go to market that are executed by automation and machines and AI? I mean, there's people who have different definitions all by humans, right? And there's a hell of a lot of the customer life cycle that I think certainly at the top of the funnel where there's a real high volume of activities that are relatively low yield that we probably can automate away from humans and do a better job of it. And there's stuff that we can't. So my view is, if you have the right data set available to you, better than any human ever could, I can tell you, he should sell to when, why, how, across watch channels, across what level of spend better than any human and the analogy I've given here is that if you like, give a rep a set of named accounts and ask them to go research an account and they have a week to do it, they'll do a pretty good job, right? They'll be like, okay, so these are the zones we can sell to. Here's the problems they're talking about. Here's what they're responsible for. Here's the message I think we can send to them. Here's the channels on which they live, right? But all of these questions, you can answer it across your entire market in real time these days, using data, machine learning AI, whatever. But then you can also feed that machine learning model, say, every single customer you've ever pinged, everything you've ever said, every customer you've ever won, the profile and the point you won, and every customer you've ever lost, but you can just feed it such a huge amount of information that these days, ML can do a better job of predicting the answers to hugely salty wire across all message, across what channels or what level of spend better than a BDR can or anyone, frankly, so a lot of that decision-making, I think we can offload from the individual, I think increasingly, AI is going to determine how we go to market. Right now, we're mainly using it to do, like to send an email or write a message as opposed to decide how and why we do something, which I think is what it's actually uniquely good at. And then the individual will flip it, will actually do a lot of the doing as opposed to the deciding. Right now, we decide how we deploy AI when we're trying to go to market. And instead, I think we need to use AI to determine how we go to market and then do the doing ourselves. I do still think we'll automate things like first touch, emails and outbound, you can do a better job of this with data. But when it comes to getting a customer on the phone or handling their objections or whatever, like for a quite a long time, I think we'll be best positioned to do that. Do you think there is a functional use for a BDR in the next couple of years? Or do you think that role goes away? Do you think they're going to be the person that's doing that first motion and still? I think we have them, a good fit for example. I don't and we don't have a now BDR is doing any enrolling of accounts and contacts in sequencing for example. Like even a puddle, like the 10 years ago, I could draw a circle around every single company in the world that was getting whatever, 30% of their traffic from China, they didn't support the Chinese one, they didn't support Alipay and send them a message without any AI saying, "Hey, you're getting $50,000 from China "and you don't support the Chinese one on Alipay." Can I show you what your checkout order like with Chinese one on Alipay? That feels like an incredibly relevant message. I can send it to the entire market and it feels personalized, right? And maybe a rep given like three hours per account could incrementally improve that message but as an incremental improvement with a massive loss in throughput. So like, I don't think they will do that 'cause I just don't think they'll be good at the increase we get from them spending the time in it would be worth it. But right now, when a customer applies so that sort of automated messaging, the rep's still way better than the AI determining what to say or what to do in that given time. So I think we just would employ them maybe in different ways or different stages in the lifecycle. But yeah, I do think they also, we still use them for co-calling as well. I don't think the tech is there yet. Maybe I'm just lagging behind a little bit on voice and co-calling. But even if it does, once you've put in that initial meeting from a co-calling, I think a BDR will still often be holding that conversation doing the discovery. Even if the technology is there, habits are really hard to change and I think at least the current generations also quite like buying from people. Even if it's more effective to do elsewhere, maybe that again will change in the future but I think that habit's gonna be relatively hard to change over time. - You think though the thing is Gen Z doesn't like buying from people but they're not necessarily buyers, especially at the enterprise software level. - Right, yeah. - Exactly, but not in the next at least a couple of years. - Yeah, that's like 20 years down the line maybe, right. And the argument against it is like POG, right? Like people spend $10, $20,000 on developer tools, via portal animations right now with their humans in the loop, right? I do still think that's very different from like not a Greenfield sale, like migrating from one tool to the other and it's 400 grand a year and you wanna speak to someone and be told they've done this before. Like I think that habit, I think is actually gonna be quite hard to untrain people away from. Maybe it's a Gen Z thing in 25 years, I don't know. - So this is interesting about AI automating a lot of that. First touch and just outbound in general. And so when we think about the top of the funnel and who owns that, there's this kind of tension of like, is it gonna be the CRO? Is it gonna be the CMO? Like who does it ultimately sit with and how do you think about that? And also what does that mean for this first revenue hire? - I have a third category to add to that question. - Go on, rev ups. - Rev ups, yeah. - Rev ups, yeah. - They all should be fighting for the same thing. And I think the reason this question exists and links to what we could be doing better today now even a good fit but certainly in the past is the core skill of the revenue leader is gonna change. Like when I was hiring our first VP sales at paddle, I'd be like, okay, so I've got us from one to five million in revenue say, I've scaled the team from 0 to 10. The next revenue leader I need and you have heard this spec is like, I need someone who's gone from 10 to 75 people, 100 people and revenue from five to 30. Whatever the numbers are, right? And you're always looking for the revenue leader who's just gone through that next stage of scale for you because again, the problems are different, the skills are different, it makes sense, right? I don't think that's gonna be the case anymore and it's because that's no longer how we're gonna grow. You don't just grow anymore by scaling head count and quotas and people but there's a plethora now of different ways you can deploy a budget and a plethora of different ways you can go to market, right? We need to decide how we're going to market across all these different channels that have emerged at what level of budget? Where are we spending money on tokens rather than people? What are we automating versus not? And I think the core skill of the future revenue leader whatever the title is or who owns it is gonna be resource allocation. The question isn't gonna be, have you done five to 10 million in revenue and scaled heads from A to B is gonna be, if I gave you 10 million quid, how much revenue would you bring me? And how would you do it, right? Like it's a different question, even being like, should we automate this or use humans for it? Like it's kind of a resource allocation, evaluations or question. And I think that's kind of why the problem is to who owns this as a merge because I think CMOs are used to managing budgets, not just people, they think about, does it make sense to run and add at this set of accounts or invite them to an event or hand them off to sales? What's gonna deliver me lowest cap for most opportunity value, right? And often the sales leaders, we haven't evaluated things in quite in that way and they're slightly less on it for cap to be honest. Or it's just not their core skill set. That being said, they're much better at the latter stages in the funnel, which is still incredibly important, right? So either the sales leaders need to upskill themselves on the resource allocation point or the CMOs will own tofu. And maybe it's just a skill set of thing and then revops in theory have the skill set to do this, but quite often those folks in the organization aren't strategic and aren't actually deploying budgets and are actually reactive to their requirements and the needs of the CMOs house or the CEO's house, but if they're strategic, maybe it's an opportunity for them. But yeah, that's the really important thing. - Do you think, or have you seen that function on the rev upside, I don't know, you're near and dear to it? Have you seen it change and evolve since your time at paddle? It didn't have good foot. - More slowly than I'd like, or think, right? Like again, I think given the way the world's going with AI and some of the stuff I'm talking about, like they should be great at determining like the resource allocation or how we utilize some of these things pre-imposed sale, but yeah, it's been slow. And I don't know why, but it will become a much more strategic function within the business. To talk about where this is headed, right? Like a lot of what we talked about has been ICP and how that helps you and like the way you got there was with better access to data, better depth and breadth. You could start to answer some of these questions better for the next agent this, as I said, is go to mark AI deciding how we go to market. And like we're at the point for example, a good fit where we. We can predict the ACV and the win rate of every single account in our market before we even spoke into them. Basically by running massive regression analysis and who we've won and lost in the past and then comparing that to the attributes of the people in market. And then when you combine a win rate and an ACV and multiply them together, you kind of get this figure called, we're calling the expected value against each account. And then if you know the expected value of an account is whatever, $500, $3 grand, you can start to think about, okay, what resources would I deploy against this account? Or how much can I spend on them? How can I maximize this ROI? All of this was quite rev up, see? If that makes sense. - Yeah it is. - But or they've been asked to calculate that in the past. But often the buck stops for them at doing the calculation as opposed to deciding what they're gonna do off the back of that information and that's how they can elevate themselves. But it's happened slower than I'd expect and I really know why. - We talked a lot about mistakes you made at hiring early on in paddle, but I think you made some good bets early on too because a lot of your team at GoodFit is some of your ex-early paddle teams. So what do you think you did right about that with those hires and why the second time around did you choose to go to those people versus hiring somebody? - I thought you'd be positioning it as a good thing 'cause I really worry about it. - Like I, you always wanna do better, right? And like the way to do better isn't necessarily to do what you did before, right? - To talk about the public experience I was saying some of the things we invented like actually were better because we didn't have anything to lean on or any experience for any kind of status quo. And like one of our values at GoodFit or it's just near and dear to me generally to be found in privileges as you just get to do values that are important to you and claim the other companies, right? But one of mine is like raise the bar and it's not good enough for me to be like good or necessarily even really good. It's like I wanna be the best and then when I become the best at something I wanna be better at every single time I do it and like really redefine what great looks like. Like nothing motivates me more than being told something is not possible and then not only proving them that it's possible but completely fucking overwhelming them as to how good the answer or the outcome I'm gonna deliver is like I'd live for it. And then in the context of hiring, right? You're going to market for your first revenue leader and there's a lot of pros to rehiring the person you work with before but my worry is always, what if better than it is now out there or exists or how do I know that I'm not, you know, just leaning on a crutch that's easy as opposed to, yeah, missing an opportunity I guess. So I worry about it but I think we made the right call because what should ultimately, it depends, right? So we just hired Adam. He was MVP sales at Paddle from one to, I don't know, almost 100 million of revenue if not 100 million of revenue. We've just hired him again, a good fit. Be terrible if I said this was a terrible idea right now. I'll be news to him, right? But it was a skill set match, right? I'm like what was Adam great at during our time at Paddle and I think he was really good at the latter stages in the sales funnel actually. Like he's great at looking at rep in the eye and helping them get a deal over the line or managing the pipeline through to close. He's less strong, I think, at top of funnel strategy and driving a bunch of opportunities or some of that resource allocation piece I would say, like determining whether this and the count that we run ads at are what spend blaster, we enrolled them with BDRs or not and or invite them to events. But a lot of the team are good fit to live for that 'cause it's where we came from. And I'm like, I know I can deliver our ever needed a sheet load of pipeline. I need someone I can trust, really trust to go and close it and I knew that was Adam's unique skill set. It worked really well for us in the past. So yeah, we hired it again. And there's so much to be said for that trust and that that relationship, like so often you tell me but these things don't work out and it's often not because this persons are very good because they don't necessarily the founder or the product or the skill set matches them quite there. And not hiring the right VB sales or zeros pretty expensive mistakes. So I don't know where we'd be having not got to hire someone immediately that I could trust and so on and so forth. - I think too, especially the second time around, you, if you're getting into that marriage knowing where the skillset gaps are, you could build around them. And you know what you're getting into versus you find that out six months in and you're like, oh no. - Yeah, this isn't quite a big time. - I didn't budget for this or yeah. - And people, Adam was the first VP of hard same for our VP of success. They were with me for four or five years. That's what we had there was for four or five years certainly to the series D, I think both of them. So to unicorn valuation from low millions in revenue and people are like, this is really fucking weird. The average 10 year very famously. I'm not even sure if it's true anymore but a million than a great job of telling us is 18 months, right? Like I often tell my marketing that we have some stats and like make sure there is known as Pavilion's 18 month one or whatever. But they were four years, right? And when people are like, how, how is their exceptional people they've got, they're amazing, right? They've got a really great set of skills but they were really great at being humble enough to recognize what they were good at and what they weren't good at. And then we worked tirelessly to build the functions and the people around them to ensure that that didn't hold them back and they could continue to succeed. In Adam's case, it was bringing it my now co-founder Alex to support him on the rev upside. And Uluko was this amazing VP of success that we had. We brought folks around, heard to be successful. So yeah, I think the skills match is important. And then again, thinking about success at good fit compared to battle. The reason I haven't hired Uluko is because the skills she was brilliant at were exactly what paddle needed but probably not what we needed good fit, right? So in this instance, I won't go back to hired because it's a skills match kind of thing. By the way, I think there's a branding moment for you where you said you don't want to just be good enough. So maybe we changed the title, the company, and then the company best fit. - If we often joke, like an ideal fit, exactly. One of the superstars in our organization is actually the younger sister of my co-founder. Like she's excellent. She will take over the world one day. I'm scared to say her name because this whole, when she's like running for prime minister, they're like, you used to associate yourself with this guy. That she's amazing and we often joke, she's just gonna quit her job and launch best fit. And then we're all, we're all, you know, is like an ongoing joke, honestly. That's funny. So you have all these lessons from paddle, you know, the first time around. What's I guess the single thing you would have changed most about how you build that team and how are you applying those lessons now? - Yeah, we alluded to it a little bit, right? So we were growing pretty fast with a team that wasn't growing. We were growing in the early days by just quite strategically selling to companies or bigger and bigger and hitting bigger targets by closing bigger deals as opposed to scaling the team. And like it took me a really long time to understand that I need to be really close to the financial plan, the business plan, the hiring plan and all of that part, staff is a really core part of being a great revenue leader. And it really hit us shortly after those folks walked out of the door and were rebuilding the team. In the, at some point, you can't keep increasing the ACV at the rate required in order to keep tripling the business at some point in time, right? And we were, we went from like one to maybe 20 people over like five years, six years, like it was a long time. That's the whole organization, not GTN. And then we had to go from like 20 to 120 people inside like eight months because we haven't been forward looking as to how we're building the team or what capacity we required. There was the worst year of growth we ever had. I think it probably still could be the worst year of growth we ever had, even as a percentage, which is kind of bad given the number scale size difference. And what I had done differently is got much closer to that business planning, that financial planning. I'd have thought about rather than being told what the revenue goal is, which was what was happening at the time. It's like working backwards from, okay, if this is the revenue goal, working back through the final list, okay, how many companies am I going to need to engage with it? You said you're my final. How does that compare to the size of the market? Okay, what is the capacity of my reps in terms of their activities and their throughput? How does this align to? I'd have just strategically built hiring in a business plan, quite frankly, that we just weren't doing. And it sounds obvious to go and do it, but even now, I think the level of depth people go into when thinking about this probably isn't great enough, like down to the capacity required for each role. We're making a basic change in our funnel, for example, at Goodver right now, whereby the time from an initial call to op creation is extending. And there's more work required where you used to be like a few days. Now it's like weeks and weeks. I'm like, okay, so now the AEs are going to have to be spending time like more time converting ICs into ops. What does this mean for their capacity? Like, are they even able to do this? Because I've made some assumptions around how many ops they can handle. This is additional work for them. Does the whole model break? And like, I just wasn't thinking in that context before and it just kind of fucked us at some point. Like, there was just too much work for two few people. And we hadn't strategically been growing our team to grow into the revenue growth goals and the growth that we have planned, basically. And I, we have to wrap up soon, but I've one more question 'cause you've done this twice. If there's a founder out there sitting at maybe sub $2 million in revenue and thinking about their first go to market hire, before they even post a job description or start reaching out, like what should they be doing? - One question whether you even need to make a hire right now. Like, I think something founders have a great ability to do is completely share responsibility for going to market in a lot of instances. And it's like, you aren't hiring someone to work out how to sell your product. You have to work out how to repeat to be sell your product. It needs to be so repeatable that it's completely fucking boring to you and light you've cracked it. And all those conversations feel the same every time because that's your responsibility. The people you hire as responsibility, depending on seniority, is to go and scale that or repeat that. They're the two basically options that you have. And until you're at the point where you're hiring someone to repeat something or scale something, thing, you're probably not ready to hire. And I think that's the mistake people have made for a number of years basically. I think the only exception to that might be particularly in this environment where there's so many different ways you can now create top of funnel or go to market. There's I think I'd excuse the founder for advising them of maybe bringing in like a growth profile, maybe alongside them, just to help them run structure experimentation into how they create top of funnel or going to market. Like that's maybe okay, particularly based on the skill set of the founder as an individual. But don't lose sight of the fact that it's yeah, your responsibility to work out how to repeatedly sell your product before you hire anyone to go and do so, whether they're scaling it or repeating it depending on I see versus leader, I guess. Yeah, I think that's missed often. And that growth profile is not an E or an SDR that is like a true growth profile. Yeah, yeah. And it's more like kind of collegiate culture and the hate to work something out. I'm going with you. If that first question is like, what's my quota and how am I going to hit it this year? Like this is not what you're looking for to start with, right? Thank you so much for joining us today. This was such a great conversation. I keep going back to the like ideal versus qualified discussion and the founder privilege and yeah, we're just so happy to have you. So send people up for success, right? I have a repeatable process. Know who your customers are, like so many people fear whether they're a leader or an I see because you haven't given them the chance to win, right? You haven't given them the resources they need to go and demonstrate their skills. And yeah, that is really on you as a founder or a leader to make happen. And also celebrating. Yeah, of course you did. You do your great job. Get some balloons maybe. Well, thank you. And you can find out more about what Harrison is building at is it good fit.io or good, yep, good fit.io. We'll put the link in the show descriptions. And if this episode was useful, please like, comment, subscribe, share, all of the above. Thanks so much.