In this episode, we dive deep into the extraordinary journey of Smartlead, a startup that skyrocketed its growth by focusing on an often-overlooked aspect: customer support. Join us as we sit down with V, the founder of Smartlead, who shares the secrets behind their explosive growth and how prioritizing customer support became their ultimate growth hack.
Key Takeaways:
- Why customer support is the hidden gem of growth strategies.
- How to create a product that truly resonates with your customers.
- Tips for integrating engineering and support teams for faster problem-solving.
- The importance of focusing on one thing at a time to achieve massive success.
Chapters:
00:00 - Introduction
03:12 - The Role of Customer Support in Business Growth
07:45 - Building a Customer-Centric Culture
12:30 - Integrating Engineering and Support Teams
18:15 - The Journey of Smartlead: From Idea to $10M
25:40 - Tips for Aspiring Entrepreneurs
32:10 - Community Engagement and Feedback Loops
39:00 - Q&A and Final Thoughts
Don't miss out on this insightful episode packed with actionable advice for entrepreneurs, startup founders, and anyone interested in building a successful business. If you enjoyed this video, please like, share, and subscribe for more content like this!
#StartupGrowth #CustomerSupport #Smartlead #Entrepreneurship #BusinessSuccess
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Vaibhav Namburi:
Customer support is a growth hack. I'm like, what do you mean? He's like, it's a growth hack. And I was like, all right, whatever, man. That's a lazy answer. And I can guarantee tell you this right now. Customer support is the growth hack that you're looking for. Hiring is hard. It is a task hiring people. Like we will give someone an offer two days before joining. They'll say, oh, whoops, I got a job somewhere else.
Andy Mewborn:
So V, thanks for jumping on, man. For those listening to this, we'll get this out in a few weeks from recording day, but V is the founder of Smartlead. Here's how I would describe Smartlead. One, it's blowing up. Two, it's amazing because it helps you get in the primary inbox. And three, if you're not using Smartlead today for cold email, then you're missing out. Uh, that's how I would describe smart lead, right? So I would I want to talk to you today about v is man like You I think you posted something on there today. How many email inboxes are on your platform right now?
Vaibhav Namburi:
I'll give you a live answer. Give me a second. Oh, okay. Nice We're gonna get the live answer. We'll do it. We'll do this live. Uh one moment email accounts, uh It takes a second to load everything up. Um, but the number I gave last time was 700 and something thousand We'll get an answer in a couple of seconds because this is peak office time, so loading a massive data load, like a full load on the database will take a few seconds. But yeah, we're closing a million mailboxes sooner than later.
Andy Mewborn:
Wow, a million inboxes in the platform. And I want to talk to you, man. SmartLead is definitely getting some traction. This is going to be a fun pod because I come from outreach, right? I worked at outreach for a while. And you know, it's kind of like when you look at a SmartLead or Instantly, you know, one of your competitors, you always see like, it's kind of this battle today between the two, right? is what I see is like, okay, should you go like the enterprise route, you know, and connect your main email inbox, or should you go, you know, should you go the smart lead route where, you know, you tie up multiple inboxes and some people consider it spam, which is like, whatever. I'm like, you should see how it's working. And I, but I think people are changing their mind about that. Right. I think like people are coming to see the light. I personally know some, I won't name them, but some people that were like totally against this, this workflow. Right. And like setting up multiple inboxes to send cold emails and, and, uh, now they're, they're seeing the light because people are registering. Well, it's getting results. So why wouldn't I do it? Um, you know, which is, which is interesting.
Vaibhav Namburi:
It's funny what money does to you, right? Yeah.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. If there's money involved, you know what? Like, Oh no, it's not spamming more.
Vaibhav Namburi:
What are those things? Yeah. What are those things? What are those things?
Andy Mewborn:
So man, I mean, you, you've got almost a million inboxes on the platform now. Thousands.
Vaibhav Namburi:
Yeah. I just checked 859,494. Wow. That's awesome, man. 859,000.
Andy Mewborn:
So you'll cross a million, like what, in a few months?
Vaibhav Namburi:
Uh, no, we add about 14 to 16k a week. So give it I think by end of may. Yeah Okay, end of may. Oh my god. That's amazing.
Andy Mewborn:
Well, we'll have to have a celebration of some kind for sure maybe a virtual one or something for sure for sure Yeah, so what I want to really dig into today be um that what I think the audience would get a huge amount of value from is you know, a lot of our listeners are go-to-market folks. So, you know, sales leaders, marketing leaders, all that fun stuff. So, V, what I want to talk to you about is, man, you've had some success, right? How, I want to talk about the cold start problem. Like, this is the most interesting to me. Like, how did you get started, right? How did you keep going and what motivates you to keep going? But I want to hear kind of that first story of like, where, how'd you come up with the idea How'd you bring it to market? Like I wanna hear all of that, man.
Vaibhav Namburi:
I'll try my best because I'm not gonna say I went with some formula. I've got my library of failures that I tell people. And it's funny because a lot of the cliche quotes that you hear are actually, they're cliche because they're true. I generally don't think I've learned much over the past year and a half as Smart Lead grew. Most of what I've, implemented was like the seven, eight years of, you know, screw ups that I've had. It's just that people are listening to me now, but I've said the same stuff back then. As I said, now it's just that there's a bit of validation. God's grace. That's, that's caused it. But so if we, if we go back in short, we found a problem because we had a protocol, Smartwriter. Smartwriter was a personalization email thing. It came out. I wanna, I'll always battle and say we're the first one in the market, but we had competitors. And we had access to OpenAI when it was beta mode. So when OpenAI released, it was like not new for us. Obviously the world went crazy, but we had access to it since 2020, I think so. It's a long time. And we integrated with a bunch of tools, Snovio, Reply, Outreach, Lemnis, you name them, right? We integrated all of them. And people would still complain about just having to use these platforms because they were just too expensive. They didn't solve the problem, et cetera. And the closest, product that came to adding multiple mailboxes was Snov.io, right? But the issue with Snov.io was they didn't allow for the rotation of the domains. So I used to use Snov.io as well, or snov.io as some people refer to it. And the way it worked was I would have to create individual campaigns and connect individual mailbox to each campaign and then start sending out messages, which then obviously still meant you can't send more than 50 to 100. I think the problem was right there. It was face front. People were paying per mailbox. People were finding it too expensive. Deliverability was a big problem. And I said, all right, one thing I learned was to not go after crowded markets. That's what every VC, every podcast, every whatever says, right? Go for the blue ocean pill, all that kind of blah, blah, blah. But I was kind of stuck because we had Smartwriter and it was making some money, it was growing, but it was also built on OpenAI. And I told my team, I probably will find that Slack message and share it. I told my team, we're going to build this email tool because we have no choice for growth and it's going to bring in maybe 10k in MRR. Don't get too excited. 10 to 20 grand maximum. And we're going to try this angle of adding multiple mailboxes, right? Let's just see what happens, guys. Because right now, Smart Rider's revenue is not growing as much as we want it to grow. Obviously, things have changed a fair bit since the 10 grand that we aimed for. I think we crossed that in a few days. God's grace. And we kept pushing a lot more. Now comes the question of what we did. Honestly, it was being part of these dark WhatsApp, Twitter, Facebook groups, and answering questions, building a good bunch of... It's the thing that no one wants to hear, which is just a lot of really shitty hard work, right? Yeah, and I think to every GTM person over here, I wasted eight years of my life looking for a shortcut, and that hack, that one thing that will make me blow up, And I realized there's really not much. So this time around, we're like, all right, whatever. Showed up, told people we had an alternative option. And the angle I took was, I was an engineer, still am an engineer. And to not discredit any of the other founders of the sales platforms, they were all salespeople. They were salespeople who've hired a technical person to do this, right? My angle was, I'm a salesperson, I'm a product person, but foremost, I've been an engineer for 10 years. So that's going to be my angle of trust. So when people come and say, why should I trust you? I was like, well, I built this shit. I didn't hire someone else to do this. I know exactly what I built. And we recently got someone challenged us on blah, blah, blah. I pulled out my RFC documents from like 2008 notes saying this is how SMTP protocols work. So you can't be challenged, right? It's as simple as that. Like I say this to my team, like let them come at me and I will release hell on them when they want to go technical. Because you have all these random delivery gurus who pop in having no clue or understanding of what they're doing. I was like, cool. I jumped on a call with one of them and told them everything. The call ended with them saying, I'm sorry. And do you have some more resources? I'm like, just like, um, so, uh, the angle we took was basically engineered for the primary inbox. So we were a hyper-technical team. I had sales experience. I built my agency, my software development company, doing a lot of adbound on LinkedIn and cold emails. So I got the principles and fundamentals of sales and copywriting. So it wasn't that I didn't understand that, but the approach to Smarty was a very technical approach. It was not a sales approach. It was realizing that there's a bunch of issues around deliverability, how IPs are maintained, how sending works, and how data patterns operate. So we said, cool, let's take that angle. Let's find a problem and let's fix that. And right now the way we've been growing it is on two fronts, support and a good product, right? Like you can get away with a shit product, but you can't get away with shit support. So I did support for the first nine months, eight months of the business. so So not dilly-dally again. It was whatsapp groups Asking and answering questions like hundreds of questions every day. I would log in at 8 o'clock in the morning. SYC. Shout out Jesse Thank you. I owe you a lot. Yes SYC sales technicians from Eric Nolowski Growth hackers all these random slack whatsapp and Twitter groups every day. I'd log in and answer questions there every single question that was asked it would be answered every single time and And then I never pitched, but it was just simply a fact that, oh, this dude knows what he's saying. Cool. Hey, what do you do? I run a protocol smartly. Cool. I'll check it out. Cause you, you know what you're talking about to some extent. They'll try the product and be like, Hey, the product actually kind of works quite well. And it's cheap, right? Sorry, if I'm not allowed to swear by the way.
Andy Mewborn:
No, you can swear. I'm a chatterbox myself. So don't worry. On YouTube, we put this is not made for children.
Vaibhav Namburi:
So it was just that. And people like the product. And then the other element, the growth hack, if someone wants to use that word, was Someone would come and tell me I really like this feature. Can you build it in about 24 hours? We'd build it. We'd build it. They'd be like what you actually built it. That's that's crazy I didn't expect you to go. I'm like, well you asked for it. So we built it and that was repeat rinse repeat rinse repeat rinse about a hundred times and then the word just spread and That's it. Like, there's honestly no magic bullet, like, formula. There's literally no special shit I did to make it whatever. The special shit was just, yeah, I took a lot of verbal beating from people saying, you know, I got called a scam a hundred times. All sorts of shit like you you get that right? So you get all the time Yeah, you get like someone on some whatsapp group like yeah, this these smart lead guys a scammer blah blah I'm like, all right Nick minute a few months later. He's a customer. So I'm like, oh Aha, thank you. So Jesse actually told me about this. He wanted to pin a term. It's about using dark groups to build communities and using those communities to build influences and work with those influences to eventually launch the product and scale it upwards and onwards. So people eventually start talking about the product, not out of goodwill, but also just the fact that it solved their problem. So I'll give you an example. The API was not our idea. We had a customer come and say, Hey, I really want to automate your stuff. Can you release an API for me? I'm like, Oh yeah. I spoke to the team. I'm like, cool. We'll release the API. It started off with like about five end points. And now we've got the most established API in the market. And that's now the entire angle. That's literally how people use us. Someone else said, hey, can you white label this product? Cause go high level does this thing. Obviously it's a different use case, but if you white label it, it will be really cool. Cause I can sell it to my customers and pretend like it's mine and close deals. Whole new angle saying use Smartly to go ahead and close customers, et cetera. So I can tell you hand on heart, I'd say about 5% of Smartly is our genius. And 95% is just people telling us what to build and we built it.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. Isn't that, man, you just gave a masterclass V in like, what are we, 13 minutes in, in like 10 minutes. Cause we were kind of jamming at the beginning, but you like, there's so much here to unpack. And the first thing is that the way you grew this, right. There was no magic bullet. And I think today everyone's looking for that magic bullet, right? Like what's the magic thing. And it's doing this stuff that doesn't scale, you know, the Paul Graham thing. And, and a And we talk about cold email and random stuff all day. And you're in there like all the time. Right. Like you're in there like if people have a problem, they're like, hey, V, and there's like a hundred people in there. Maybe we've got this issue. All right. I'm looking into it. You know, I've seen you do that. Like, yeah, it's amazing, man, especially, you know, it's easier to do that in the in the early days. Yeah. Right. But you're still over here like, you know, you're blowing up and then you're still in there doing that, which is amazing. And then I always see you saying like, hey, we're about to hire another support person. I'm hopping on for today. And so I see you still hopping on to support, which is amazing, man. And, you know, I think people underestimate the support side, right? Because it all ties together because you said the way you've built a great product is by listening to people. Ninety five percent of the genius is listening to your customers. And I'm guessing a lot of that feedback comes through support, too.
Vaibhav Namburi:
Yeah. So because we hire support, a lot of support teams are the largest team now in the business. When we hire and support people, they come so burned from the previous companies because they literally treated like third class citizens. Right. And I will be like, so we hired another person like, Oh, I'd love to have an opportunity to contribute to the product. I'm like, what do you mean? You are literally the eyes and ears of the business. If you're not contributing the product, I'm going to kick you out. Right? Like you log in, you answer questions. Your job is to understand patterns and then speak to the PM and be like, Hey, this is a common issue. They're like reporting. We need to build a feature out of this. And that's how we grow. That is literally how we've grown. So there's no excuse over here. The support team is the eyes and ears of the business and that's what defines the entire growth engine for the company. A friend of mine said this, no college shout outs, they're called Paper Farm and he's in Sydney. And I asked this question to Dean, I'm like, hey Dean, how did you grow? And he gave me this answer and I was like, this is the laziest answer someone can give me. He's like, customer support is a growth hack. I'm like, what do you mean? He's like, it's a growth hack. And I was like, all right, whatever, man. That's a lazy answer. And I can guarantee, tell you this right now, customer support is the growth hack that you're looking for. I'm still in the WhatsApp groups. I'm still in the Twitter threads. I'm still everywhere because that's how we grow. Scalable or not, I'm not sure, but it's worked for us. 800,000 is in. But one more sort of thing to just maybe add in over there is, I find it really funny when a founder goes, I'm not cloud chasing at all. I could not care how much money they make or we make. We're never public with our revenue. There'll be someone I know making significantly less than us and want a badge of honor because they jumped on the support chat to help people out and be like, I do support calls twice a month. I'm like, what the hell are you doing otherwise? What's your job? You're like eight people. Your job is to sell and solve people's problems. Stop acting like some high roller over here. You're eight people sit down, right? So I think when founders and CEOs go into this mindset, and just one last story, sorry, you need to stop me if I dilly-dally a lot, because ADHD brain. I remember it was December, 2022. We're about six months into the business. And I love these two guys, they're good friends, but I went for a friend's wedding and it was like 11 o'clock at night. And they're MBAs, right? They're both MBAs from very, very reputed universities. And they saw me, they're like, what are you doing? I'm like doing support chat. They're like, oh, you're a customer support rep, right? And you're meant to be a CEO, blah, blah, blah, et cetera. I'm like, one day you'll get it. One day you'll get it. And, but I think that's the notion people tend to have is like support is like the lowest form of like, it is literally the fundamental top point of the business. And, uh, Bezos said this as well. You need to be obsessed with what people want. And look at our reviews. If we have a hundred reviews, 95% will be about support.
Andy Mewborn:
That's awesome. Because a lot of people today, I think a lot of CEOs are more focused on in disagree with me if you want, but They're a lot very focused on revenue and don't get me wrong. Obviously that's the oxygen to the company, but you never hear about founders or CEOs talk about support like in general, right? Like it's, it's kind of like this. They're talking about retention of, you know, the big thing today is NRR and like over a hundred percent or more, blah, blah, blah, blah. But no one's ever talking about customer support. Um, so I like how you, how you're doing this, which is like, you know, how you help, how you give people a good experience. You sit down and you have conversations with what's working. What's not like via support. And, um, on my LinkedIn, dude, people ask me, they go. I have my title for distribute. My company is founder and customer support.
Vaibhav Namburi:
That's my title.
Andy Mewborn:
Right. And people are like, Hey, I'm having a problem. They'll message me. Hey, I'm having a problem with distribute, but I think you're the founder. Like, should I be messaging? I'm like, you absolutely should be.
Vaibhav Namburi:
That's my job. Right.
Andy Mewborn:
And so I think it's, it's one of those things that, um, you know, and unless you've kind of like, worked in customer support or built something and realize this, it's, it's hard to understand unless you almost got a career start in customer support too. Like you're rare, right? You're rare where you were an engineer. I was all, guess what? I was also an engineer, right? Which is funny. So I, you know, I studied electrical engineering. So that's, that's where I started. And then when I was at, you know, a unicorn company, um, outreach, right? Like I ran support for a while. , OK seven Shout out to whoever made that decision. It wasn't me, but you know, whoever did, at first I was like, this is a little weird, but then I'm like, you start to get in there, you're like, no, this eliminates like a bunch of friction actually. Right? Like, cause you know, he said, she said, and then it kind of goes on the chain. And then what the customer actually said gets muffled or changes. And so I'm super bullish. We haven't scaled our support team yet, but I'm super bullish that when we do, It's gonna be direct ties to engineers man, you know, like no bs in the middle planning. It's like get it fixed.
Vaibhav Namburi:
Let's figure out a fix every day Every day is 6 to 6 30 p.m. Engineering and cs catch up every day Really? Every day. So all seven engineers and the entire nine CST members catch up every day to discuss issues, problems, questions every day. It's a non-negotiable.
Andy Mewborn:
So it's like a running stand-up with, it's a stand-up meeting.
Vaibhav Namburi:
Every day is a stand-up. Every day is CSN engineering. There is no, no in between, no PM comes in between to do anything. Features, sure, PMs get involved, et cetera. But in terms of issues, problems, conversations, The engineering team needs to know the direct impact of their work. The engineering team is also in our Slack community. So when there's a question or an issue that is raised, I tag the appropriate engineer so they are accountable for what they build and they know directly what's actually being generated. And that gives them that ridiculous amount of sense of ownership. where they're not just getting a line item or a ticket to fix a bug, but it's literally you just saved my business this much money or you saved me 17 hours. Thank you. I owe you this. Like I appreciate this a lot.
Andy Mewborn:
So yeah. Wow. That's, that's awesome, man. And man, that's, yeah. I, what is some other stuff that you found? V, so you're an operator man as well. Like, I don't know if you give yourself enough credit for that, but. You're definitely like a good operator. Just that CS talking to engineering. I know I'm taking that as a nugget as other people should hear. What are some other operational things that you've done that you think are maybe counterintuitive sometimes or like kind of against the grain that have helped you propel the biz?
Vaibhav Namburi:
I think it always comes down to the engineering side of things, right? Which is layers of abstraction. So whenever engineers release a feature or fix a bug, I tell them to go tell the customer. It gives the community a very close sense of like, oh, this is not like a, hey there, my name is John from the CS team. I spoke to the engineering team over here, we fixed it. No, it's like, hey, my name's this, I fixed your bug, here it is, all the best, right? Um, but then as soon as they do that, we tell engineering to step away because it can be very distracting when the customer is like, they get access to like the engineer and they'll start asking like a hundred questions. It was like, yeah. So you have to be very careful in that balance. So it's like, it's to give them the sense of acknowledgement that I'm here to solve your problem. And then after it's a very doctor nurse experience, right? Like you don't want the nurse to go out and tell you the actual, like you want them to be there to take care of you, but the surgery has to be done by the doctor. Right. Yeah.
Andy Mewborn:
So that's a good, that's a great analogy.
Vaibhav Namburi:
Yes. So it's the same concept, right? So that's what like, we're like, after you go through a surgery, the nurse is handling you, but then you, you wait for the doctor to come and be like, Oh yeah, you're doing good. Like that 30 second tap on your feet. Be like, while you're dying, they're like, Oh yeah, don't worry. I know I fixed you. And you just want that sense of security from the surgeon saying, yeah, he's good. He's good to recover. So that's kind of what the engineering comes. It does. And it gives that team that sense of like, okay, this person fixed my shit. Now I'll go to support. So that's one thing. The other thing is, um, everyone in growth has KPIs to do customer calls, um, uh, X amount of times a year. So like 15,000 minutes of interviews, uh, or 1500, uh, hours, sorry, 1500 minutes of interviews every quarter or something like that. They need to perform.
Andy Mewborn:
Every person, even, even engineers are just the customer success.
Vaibhav Namburi:
No, no. So engineers already involved in the thing as it is. Yeah. No, no. This is growth. Like the content team will do support sometimes. The head of growth is doing support sometimes. The designer, our design lead is in our Slack channel doing support sometimes. Everyone is doing support. Now that brings in a bunch of issues where, where do we collect this data? So that's obviously a problem we're trying to fix ourselves because there's so much feedback we're getting. But everyone does support, everyone's involved in it, and it's a collective conversation. It's very customer focused. The business is extremely customer focused. And the other thing is I think one thing I've worked with the engineering team Especially or the growth team is I said data beats opinions So there's many times as much as you try as a founder People don't tend to disagree with you as much as you beg and plead them be like tell me I'm wrong, please I'm begging you to tell me and have an opinion and But I get it, right? As much as I fought it, I understand that some people don't. And eventually some people do after they work with you with a long time, they build that sense of trust that, hey, I can tell this guy what the hell he wants and he's not gonna do anything. So the opinion I go with my team, because we're making a decision right now with my head of growth and we have opposing opinions. So I'm like, cool dude, no problems. We'll catch up on Tuesday. You point your data, I point my data and we'll see what works. Then it's less a game of, my ego versus your ego my opinion versus your opinion yeah and it's just it takes a little longer don't get me wrong because now you it's not just i'm telling you to do it and you and you make it happen but this way everyone's involved and what this does is then it has encouraged the team to consistently provide ideas so it goes from me being the idea man to me being Oh, yeah, that's cool. Maybe let's do this idea. And so this idea first of the other and then we'll make it happen So you just go into prioritization? So that's that's it.
Andy Mewborn:
Nice. Nice That's man. And then as the founder, how are you? So right now you you know, you're at this point where you're getting lots of traction I mean you're involved in customer support. You're an engineer. So like I You know, you have ADHD, you know, brain, you mentioned I also do, which is a blessing and a curse, right? At the same time, because, you know, sometimes it's like you can focus really hard on one thing. And you can always do that, and you know you can get things done, and then you can task switch very quickly.
Vaibhav Namburi:
It's not an issue. I tell my team, it's either two weeks or two hours. That's how I work. Yeah, exactly, right? Exactly.
Andy Mewborn:
Two weeks, it's like, there's no between. So for you, how are you delegating your time today, right? Like, how are you doing that? And I'm sure this is an ongoing process that we always are like, how do we optimize what we do and how we do it. But how are you thinking about that today?
Vaibhav Namburi:
Uh, look, I make it look like I do a lot, but there's a very good set of people doing everything right now. Um, I. I just maybe just I try being omnipresent here and there where I can be. But our head of growth crushes it. Our head of engineer crushes it. Our head of support crushes it. So they actually handle a lot of that. It's just nowadays I handle escalations mainly more than anything. But I think it was an Andrew Wilkinson podcast or Sam Parr from MFM. Yeah. Yeah, so it's the same thing as like you said, you're an engineer, you did sales, you did support. So you and me are very similar, right? Is you just, you know enough to be dangerous. That's it, right? I think that's kind of where it comes from. And that passing note to every founder, right, is I wrote amongst the first lines of code for the business. I wrote the first 70 help articles. I wrote the content, the first few blogs launched for the business. I did the first set of support. I managed the design for the first bit. So you have to do everything. There is no alternative over here, in my opinion. And then you eventually find, you hit that threshold where you can only do 60% and then you get people better than you. So my day, to answer your question, starts off with mainly product management is what I do right now. figure out what we need to work on and prioritize as a team, then handle any customer support issues, then go through the current growth challenges and how we're going to hit our targets and so on and so forth. And then come back to support. That's my day.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah. Nice.
Vaibhav Namburi:
Nice.
Andy Mewborn:
Nice. Man. And And how much time are you spending recruiting these days? Like, is that?
Vaibhav Namburi:
Oh, yeah, it's it's it's it's it's don't get me started. It's absolutely painful. I was literally calling my sister and complaining to her like I don't complain about anything in life. I'm very grateful to where I am. Very blessed to God, but yeah. Oh, yeah. Yo, it is. It is. It is a task hiring people, mate. It is a task hiring people. I was just moaning to my recruiter where, you know, we see all these candidates on LinkedIn complain about recruiters don't call me back or how bad of this company to not respond to me after I applied. I'm like, you realize it's much worse on the other side. Like we will give someone an offer two days before joining. They'll say, oh, whoops, I got a job somewhere else. And you can do all the tricks in the trade, right? You can like ship them a laptop. You can give them a signing bonus. Makes no difference to them, right? They'll return the money back, but it's... And then you'll have candidates who lie about their, you know, whatever they are. And so a lot of my job right now, I think again, quoting from MFM, which is you start off the journey of a founder is a product manager, then a people manager, then a money manager. Um, I'm in the people manager phase right now, which is my entire job right now starts with recruitment. I do like about eight interviews a day at the moment, um, ranging between 30 to 45 minutes. And that is every day, every week right now. So we're hiring a lot. Um, but we're hiring for four roles, but our, it's so specific. Like, I don't know how to explain to people. We, we send 28 million emails a day. Right. Um, So it's there's there's the volume is very tough to find someone who's done that type of scale, right? Yeah So because even if you hire an ex-uber or Zomato or whatever type engineer They're so big as a firm that that one person is probably done a one siloed sector one siloed think of one siloed place Yeah, it's a very different for us is like one of our engineers who joined he was like I'm not used to having so much access I'm like, yeah, well we're six, seven devs right now. So you're technically 25% of the entire business's engineering, like workforce. So you will have full authority and you have full ownership. We've given you the trust to go build this. So build it, deploy it. If it fails, no one gets blamed. We just keep trying and testing. So hiring engineers and then giving them that sense of security from their years of conditioning that they need to get seven layers of approval is another thing. And my team keeps giving me a feedback like, I'm not used to having so much freedom. I'm like, well, get used to it. Like you have a lot of freedom over here. Just make it happen. And don't worry if you screw up. And I keep posting this on the Slack channel. Whenever like someone says a DM to me, I'm like, all of your mistakes in every single team member combined multiplied by five is the number of mistakes I've made. So I assure you, you are in no place to worry about screwing up and then getting anything back from me. So it's okay. Yeah, to answer very longly your answer it is I'd say Majority of my day right now is recruiting if you go on my LinkedIn You'll see that, you know hiring ad set up here like six seven roles.
Andy Mewborn:
We're hiring for right now So yeah, wow, and then and then do you have a recruiter too or are you kind of a recruiter? And you're involved in every hire right now, though.
Vaibhav Namburi:
You want to make sure that you're involved. So that's one rule I learned from the Atlassian brothers, is they hired their first 1,000 engineers, 1,000 team members, because that gets to define the culture. Like, you get to define the culture that way. For me, that's very important. I think the reason why some people stay within the business when things get tough is just because they enjoy it. Sometimes it's just a cool place to work because they get the freedom that they couldn't get another place. The CS is a great example, right? A lot of the CS teams, like our CS can get rough sometimes. And they just want to say, because they're like, yo, I'm actually getting to contribute to the product. I'm literally seeing my stuff getting implemented and released, and I don't think I'll get that dopamine hit anywhere else. So, yeah, that's how I tend to work towards it.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah, nice. And I like that from that Last Team Brothers, because obviously in Australia, we haven't even mentioned that. So, man, you've got some killer companies out of Australia. Now you've got Canva, you've got... Atlassian you've got what else came out of Australia?
Vaibhav Namburi:
Yeah Those are the two big ones There's also like these employment heroes on some weird like employment company But yeah can run the class in the two big ones that yeah, we can boast right?
Andy Mewborn:
So those have you learned anything else from the Alaskan brothers or Canva that you're kind of like taking because that is kind of like your ecosystem Yeah, you follow them closely, right?
Vaibhav Namburi:
Counterintuitively, not as much Canva or other businesses. The thing is, we are profitable and we're growing, which is not something VC is necessarily like. So when I, it's just like, you're that odd family member that no one knows what you do and you can't really get along with because your methods are so different. Yeah, yeah, so that's that's kind of how we tend to operate so a lot of these businesses focus heavily on growth and At any cost right because that's how you raise the next round, right? I don't want to take outreach as an example. We'll just take reply who cares about them and So we take a lot of these enterprise companies, and what they do, and you'd know this, you run the sales team, is you would push for year-long contracts, right? You would drive for that larger contract value, one-year lock-in, two-year lock-ins, whatever it is, because on a paper value, that makes your churn look drastically low, and that is what you're going to use as a way to leverage yourself to the next funding round. Right? Which we all know is not true because after two years, you're going to lose that customer to someone else, hands down, most of the time. And the way you fix that is you start building retention models within the business. I'll add a CRM, I'll add a power down. You just suck them into the product and they don't leave because there's nowhere else for them to go. So it offsets the fact that the core product may not be good. But what ends up happening with that is you need to have a very large team to do these kinds of things. We're 24 people, right? And, um, I've always been against the concept of hiring aggressively. And I'm a very big believer in the revenue per employee metric, which is what the Atlassian boys do as well. Um, cause they were, people don't know this Atlassian was bootstrapped, I think till like a hundred million ARR or some crazy, crazy number. Like, Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah. I think they only raised for their IPO. They never raised venture debt. They're one of the most successful companies on that note is they didn't have a sales team. It was just the two founders like selling shit. It was very product growth. And they did this concept of acquiring businesses that were correlated so they had confluence they had bitbucket they had Jira They had all these other products that they sort of blended together and started cross-selling to each other on an enterprise cycle. So So yeah, so on our side the reason why we are a little different to them is because we go very conservatively on our hiring and then we put a lot more energy on each team member and But one thing I can say that we did learn from the Australian audience, the Australian customers, is to focus on America. Tell me more about that. It's such a small market. It's 24 million people. I think even in our own customer base in Smartlead right now, Australia is amongst the smallest set of users. America takes about 80% of our market, maybe even more. Then Europe follows and then India follows after that. India, Pakistan, Southeast Asia follows after that. The Australian market generally is not more receptive to trying out products that are early. They need that sense of like, this has been around for 10 years and I can trust this to the core. It's changing now, but the general rule and like the general grapevine conversation is Australia is behind UK by five years and UK is behind America by two years. In fact technology and technology.
Andy Mewborn:
Yeah, but ahead in fashion, obviously, right fashion, of course.
Vaibhav Namburi:
Yeah The hairstyles and fashion you can't yeah the hair and fashion. Yeah, I am growing my mullet. You're getting the mullet. You're getting a mullet right now It's coming in it's coming in my son has one i'll have to send you a picture.
Andy Mewborn:
Love it We just, he's 20 months, 22 months old now. And so we just let it grow. And then we cut a mullet and I'm like, dad and son are going to have a mullet together, man.
Vaibhav Namburi:
Let's do it for that blue passport. Love it. Yeah, exactly. I know. Love it.
Andy Mewborn:
Oh man. So, okay, cool. So yeah, you focus on the U.S. market. And then the other thing I see that's beautiful about SmartLead is you have a bunch of people building like agencies on top of SmartLead, right? They're basically running people's cold email campaigns because SmartLead is a great product, but obviously there's still a lot of technical stuff that's involved to like get all these mailboxes, set them up correctly. it's still a lot of work, right? To like make it run correctly. And so you have these people running agencies that'll run cold email for you, basically build that cold email systems on top of smart lead. And some of these people are doing, you know, I won't name names, but they're doing like six figures a month, you know, insane numbers and it's all run on smart lead. So, you know, my question to you is, Like what, how'd you build that out? Was that a natural thing as well that people were just like, Ooh, I can offer this as a service. And then two, how do you, how do you support those people? Right. And make sure that you can kind of keep that vibe going.
Vaibhav Namburi:
Yeah, um, I don't know who says where I read it what it was. Um, I think this was during my e-commerce field e-commerce businesses days, which is um, Make people money save people money save people time improve convenience improve confidence improve remove pain and improve social status This is how you build a business, right? These are like the seven eight rules the more you can fill in the better, right? So I was like, all right, how do I build, make people money? Simple, call emails, sell them, save people money, API integrations, automations, save people time is again, API integrations and automations, right? Improve social status, which is the white labeling experience, right? So that's basically what we're building. Improve their convenience, which is effectively the fact that we allow our customers to then work with agencies to build their own outbound experience. So our customers are served by our own customers. That convenience of outbound is done by our own customers. So it's a self-fulfilling cycle. So we have a bunch of agencies of verified partners who have massive accounts with us. And then there's existing smart lead customers who would be like, I can't do this. It's too complex. So they hire an agency that are vetted by us, who use us. So their account just becomes bigger through us. So it's like a self-fulfilling cycle. And then they then use us as a social status piece, which is everyone gets a certified Smart Lead badge. Because with agencies, they're not very popular on like, they're not SaaS business. You don't put an agency as a logo because no one knows like agencies, right? They're very B2B. So how do we verify people when they're trying to cross close deals? You're like, hey, this massive agency of this massive SaaS product, which is spending tons and tons of money in marketing, so you probably have heard of them, have verified us, right? So we've got the social status built in. So there's a certified partner badge. So if you go to some of our partners, you'll go to the website, you'll see the smart team badge that's stuck over there, right? So these are the basic things that we did and it was done on purpose. It was very much done on purpose and it's a very much sell shovels, not gold type experience where You are much better at, I've done the agency thing. I know how ridiculously difficult it is. I'd rather give you the tools to make you do that better. So that was that. And managing them is again, we have a CSM and 10 CS team members for that very main reason is to give them that premium experience and make sure they're protected, taking care of any questions they have are answered and so on and so forth. Wow.
Andy Mewborn:
So you have someone specifically just to help manage like the agency partners right now.
Vaibhav Namburi:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we have a dedicated CSM called Akash. If anyone crosses like, I think 90K to 120K leads, they all know him. Email access, direct access, like immediate response times. So Akash's job is just to manage our enterprise customers, our agency customers, and then everyone else that works with the support team, which is also just as good in premium, but with Akash, you know, like he's just, he's my guy, like he's there for me 24 sevens and so forth. Yeah. Yeah. So cautious. They're nice and nice.
Andy Mewborn:
Well, dude, V, this has been awesome, man. Such great info, dude. I think I, you know, somebody, the main nuggets that people can get out of this, if I were to recap is like, don't sleep on customer support. The way to build a business is getting in these like dark social circles. Right. Shout out to Chris Walker. I think he kind of came up with that term, but Yeah that there and then lastly like Getting engineering and support closer together, which I think is like a huge hack. That's a growth hack, right? That's that helps you like go through cycles way quicker and then man, I like that what you said is like How you work as a founder you are basically? Still involved in the hiring process for every single person Right. Making sure you build that right culture, find the right people. And then hiring is fucking hard. Right.
Vaibhav Namburi:
Recruiting is hard. People are tough, man. Like code is easy. If it breaks, it breaks. It's big red lines. Error is not working. People are, it's, it's, I mean, people are beautiful, but with that beauty comes a whole dynamic of like, you know, Depth that you just need to know. Yeah, people can't be solved, right? Like it's now they can't they need to be understood That's that's the main difference, right? So and that's where I guess there's a lot of Yeah, you like I don't have hair and I'm very happy for that because I'd be losing it very fast right now Yeah, so anyways, yeah, man, if I can help with anything it cut out me.
Andy Mewborn:
Let me know brother I'll be I'll be cheerleading for for smartly till death.
Vaibhav Namburi:
Thank you, sir. Thank you. Appreciate it. Heaps man. I'll talk to you soon, brother
