🎧🍌 The AI-Native GTM Playbook | Sam Blond, Monaco
Why you shouldn't measure brand marketing, Monaco's launch playbook, how gifting and timing increase conversion rates, and how to improve your AI outbound
Sam is one of the best sales operators in tech. He spent four years as CRO at Brex, where he helped scale it to a ~$12B valuation, ran sales at Zenefits before that, and got his start at EchoSign.
If there’s a modern GTM playbook, Sam helped write it. Our conversation below walks through how AI has rewritten a big chunk of it.
But most importantly, we talk about what hasn’t changed.
We get into the sales work AI is now better at than humans, and why Sam thinks 90% of startups misdiagnose their bottleneck as conversion when it’s really demand gen.
He explains why he doesn’t measure early brand marketing at all and trusts anecdotes over attribution, walks through the full Monaco launch playbook including the Super Bowl box-truck story, and shares a rev-ops insight from Brex, including how they figured out a specific ICP converted at 4x the rate of another.
Thanks to Jack Altman and Everett Randle at Benchmark for helping brainstorm topics for the conversation!
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Timestamps to jump in:
0:00 Scaling Brex to $12B
1:14 How AI speeds up prospecting and TAM building
5:19 Using AI to get more leverage
9:15 Incubating Monaco at Founders Fund
12:56 Innovator’s dilemma in AI
15:57 AI companies should build full platforms instead of wedge products
23:30 Revenue is just a math equation
27:18 Two ways AI increases conversion rates
36:56 AI will never replace spending time with customers
39:46 Don’t measure the impact of brand marketing
49:03 Your marketing must be different (and hard)
58:39 Customer discovery calls and working with design partners
1:03:03 The zero to 100 launch
1:11:00 Monaco’s launch playbook
1:19:00 Send gifts that are unique and social
1:22:17 Naming your company
1:28:04 Founders should send early outbound
1:32:38 How multi-channel augments AI outbound
1:39:42 Using intent signals and outreach timing to increase conversions
1:43:28 Two common ways founders mess up when scaling revenue
1:50:22 Monaco’s Forward Deployed AE
Referenced:
Find Sam on X / Twitter and LinkedIn
👉 Stream on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple
Transcript
Find transcripts of all prior episodes here.
Turner Novak:
You’re most well-known for scaling Brex to, I think, $12 billion, which is kind of what the headline numbers will say. I thought it’d be fun to do a deep dive, kind of like a modern GTM playbook. The world’s changed a little bit since you’ve done that. You were just telling me before we started recording that you’ve thought a lot about it, but you haven’t really talked about it much publicly. So it’d be interesting: what has changed the most in the sales process over the past couple years?
Sam Blond:
Yeah, well, as I said, thanks for having me. And Brex, just for context, maybe as we segue into how things have changed, I left Brex in early 2022. So if you think about the evolution of AI, my entire experience at Brex, which ranged from 2018 to 2022, it was all pre-AI.
Then I spent some time with Founders Fund, and Monaco started as a bit of an incubation there, and then it became its own independent business. But things are quite different, both from 2018 when I joined Brex and 2022 when I eventually left. I think there are specific sales workflows that AI and agents are just better than humans at, and these are the things that are fully online. I’ll give a few examples of what those things are.
Then I can pattern match to the time at Brex and where people were spending their time. An example would be building your TAM based off of your ICP. So you’re a company, you want to sell to a bunch of companies, and you have an idea of what this list of companies looks like. Let’s go create a database of all of the companies that we want to sell to.
Historically, that is where, it’s called prospecting, a lot of salespeople, and maybe even founders if it was pre-hiring sales folks, spent their time. Going on LinkedIn, finding different company types, logging into databases, running lists, filtering the data, exporting the data, manipulating those lists, adding different employee counts and different locations and different verticals and sub-verticals.
Turner Novak:
So this is trying to qualify if your specific customer needs to meet certain criteria. It’s probably a certain size company, a certain thing that they do. So you’re saying they’re manually going through it in a spreadsheet, possibly. Maybe there are some tools that exist that’ll give you a dump out, but you’re filtering this down manually.
Sam Blond:
That’s right. You just want to create a database of companies that you can sell to. And doing that, historically, it’s an iterative process. But it takes a lot of time.
Turner Novak:
What percentage of time of the general sales process was this stuff?
Sam Blond:
Well, if you are dedicated to outbound and generating demand, like an SDR, some meaningful percentage of your time when I was at Brex and pre-AI was dedicated to finding new companies that you can reach out to. And then the outreach was actually maybe the easier part of the process. You just drop someone in a pre-written sequence. But finding the right people at the right time, that took a lot of time, and it took a lot of labor resources in this category of sales.
So there’s this concept of building your TAM, finding all the companies that you can sell to. Then scoring your accounts, because not every company is created equal. If you think about, we’ll just leverage Monaco or even Brex because it’s similar, as an example. You’re selling to startups.
Well, not all startups are created equal. There are going to be some that have dynamics about that business that make it a better fit for you to sell to. Are they in San Francisco? For us, we may want to more highly score or prioritize an account that is headquartered in San Francisco.
There are going to be some that are the sweet spot for employee count range. There are going to be some where the business model matters. Is it sales-led growth? Is it product-led growth? Some dynamics of the company that influence the way that you may want to prioritize that company. So historically, this was a very manual process.
So you build your TAM, you score your accounts, and you then overlay signals. These are things like visiting the website. Are they hiring for a certain role? Again, you can kind of do this with a human, but agents are just better at this stuff today.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, because you might literally spend 10 minutes scrolling through the career page just to see if they’re hiring for a certain role, and that happens in a second with AI.
Sam Blond:
You can have an agent that crawls every career page and website in your entire database in basically real time.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Sam Blond:
And so you then get to finding the buyers. There’s this startup, we sell to the sales leader. Who is the sales leader? What is their email address? Again, that used to be a manual process that humans would have to go through. All of this can be done in near zero time. And it’s super high leverage just in terms of how then salespeople or founders can spend their time when they’re thinking about go-to-market.
So maybe the right way of thinking about how AI is impacting go-to-market today, and I just gave a bunch of the workflow examples, is this: it is not a silver bullet. It is providing founders and salespeople leverage to spend their time on the things that AI is less good at.
And the two big categories for this, the first is customer-facing and developing relationships. You should be able to get a bunch of leverage from the agents that are creating meetings from this database of companies, writing the sequences for you, targeting people at the right time, ultimately meaning you spend more of your time customer-facing. Agents are not good at that. People still want to buy from people.
And then the second thing I would describe as more creative brand or demand gen campaigns. These are the types of things that just require some creativity and ingenuity, but also operational complexity. You want to put up billboards. It’s difficult for AI to come up with that idea as a concept. What is the creative? Work with the company that sells the billboards.
That’s one example, but we could go through a whole bunch. You’re doing a launch, you raised a round of funding, or you have a new product launch. AI might be able to give you some ideas on that, but the orchestration of that, creating the video, coming up with the concept, distributing that video on social, those are the things that are very high ROI use of human labor today, and we can spend more time on that stuff because AI is giving us leverage in the areas that historically we had to spend a bunch of time.
Turner Novak:
And so you had spent a bunch of time doing sales, leading successful sales teams, and you decided, “I’m going to start this AI-native sales company.” What was the thing in the market that made you decide this was an okay thing to do, the highest opportunity for you to work on?
Sam Blond:
I sort of fell into it. I don’t know that it was part of the plan. I was at Founders Fund doing investing, and one of the things that Founders Fund has a track record of doing is incubating companies. Many of the greatest technology companies, from Palantir to Anduril, and Scott has one called General Matter, and Delian has Varda, and more, are Founders Fund incubations.
At the time, maybe it’s 2023, and not a lot of capital’s being deployed. It’s still a bit of a hangover from 2022. There’s only one type of technology company that I’m qualified to be the founder of, given that I’m a non-technical founder. And that is a go-to-market or sales technology company.
And then thinking about the space broadly, I do think that we are, maybe not quite the early innings so much anymore, but relatively early trending towards the middle innings of a platform shift through which a new market leader will emerge. If we think about the category broadly, this is go-to-market technology or sales technology. The market leader is Salesforce. Salesforce benefited from the platform shift of on-prem to the cloud.
I think AI in a lot of ways rhymes with this. It is an architecture-level decision whether you are AI-native or pre-AI. And so there’s only one type of technology company that I’m qualified to be the founder of, a sales technology company. Now is the time to be the founder of a sales technology company, or you could probably apply that across all enterprise software. The function is ripe for disruption. I can go deeper on what is different about our approach, but that’s the high level of why this company, why now.
Turner Novak:
I feel like you actually see it less today, but it’s probably a year-ish ago, maybe a year and a half ago, there was a lot of talk of, whatever the big incumbent is, they have all this distribution. They’re just going to do some AI features and they’re going to win. I don’t know if that’s necessarily happened yet. Did you go through that maze of how the market’s going to evolve, what should we do?
Sam Blond:
Well, I think I have an opinion on it, and I think it’s hard to predict. A couple things are true. The first is, the market leader in this category, which today is CRM, we are going to invent a new category. We think CRM is the legacy thing, a reactive database that people used to work in when I was at Brex and at companies prior. I think now there’s something more oriented around revenue automation.
We are not just disrupting or displacing the IT budget or the software layer. We’re also going after the labor. And so we are far more outcome-oriented and labor-disruptive than, historically, the reactive database that was the enterprise software layer. So we believe that the future market leader is just going to be significantly larger than today’s market leader, because it’s not just the IT budget that the winner of this market is going after, it’s also the labor budget. And the labor budget is arguably larger than the IT budget.
And then, thinking about how the space evolves over time, it’s hard to predict which company or vendor will be the market leader or the winner here. It’s certainly possible that it is Salesforce, but I do think the incumbents, whether it’s Salesforce or HubSpot or others, they’re faced with a bit of an innovator’s dilemma, where they have an existing set of customers and revenue that are on a platform that was architected pre-AI and pre-agents.
And so they can either continue to serve those customers and invest in the relationships on the existing platform and improving that existing platform, or they can start from scratch and start to disrupt themselves with an entirely new, truly AI-native platform. Up until this point, the decision that has been made is to try and overlay AI on top of this pre-AI system architecture.
That is better than no AI, but less good than first-principles thinking of, if we were going to build this from scratch, would we do it differently? Of course you would. You wouldn’t architect a platform with a UI to be reactive to user input when you actually have an agent do the input pretending to be a human.
Turner Novak:
Well, and when you think about how the products are sold, whether it’s sold top-down or bottoms-up, I feel like that depends on how you would implement the AI features. If it’s still sold from steak dinners to an innovation committee, it’ll be built a certain way, versus if it’s, the dude just needs to start using it and it needs to work really well and save a bunch of time, make the money, cut costs. That product decision is a lot, and what that looks like is so much different from the other end of the spectrum.
Sam Blond:
Well, and maybe eventually it’s all of the above. My version of that is something like, I think the disruption and evolution of the market is a bit Darwinian, in that we are like Salesforce in the prior era. We’re starting with a narrow, almost niche segment of the market, which for us is technology startups.
And we’re already executing on building a better product for a very narrow segment of the market that today, if you think about where Salesforce’s revenue is concentrated, it is not in early-stage startups. So right now it’s not that disruptive to this really large business. But we will then start to move upmarket. We will start to move outside of technology startups, but it starts with this narrow segment of the market that we can get to as close to a monopoly as possible, and then organically expand from there.
But again, tying it back to the original thought, the disruption we think is Darwinian. The really large enterprises, it’s very difficult to get off of the platform or system of record, or in this case Salesforce specifically. And so this is a many-years-long journey that starts with very transactional sales to founders, and over time gets to steak dinners with committees that are considering the next five-year technology implementation.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, and it’s interesting when you describe it as a revenue engine. Every company, every dollar of GDP, is revenue really. So you think about building a business that has the biggest TAM possible. Everything needs to make money. So the runway of how big it could get is just the global economy. I’m not saying that the TAM is $100 trillion, but that’s what you’re playing in. Every business needs to make money.
Sam Blond:
You should be my hype man for talking to VCs. I think a couple things come to mind as you articulate that. One is, the outcomes are very objective.
Turner Novak:
With revenue generation?
Sam Blond:
With revenue, that’s right. So we are building the platform to drive towards outcomes. Those outcomes, there are some inputs, inputs being things like meetings generated, conversion rates. Ultimately, though, the outcome of that equation is revenue, customer growth. And so measuring the success of a platform like Monaco, when we are oriented around customer acquisition and revenue growth, it’s relatively objective, but relatively easy.
And then if you think about where, and I’m sure there’s some market data on this, and maybe I should have a more thoughtful answer, but if you think about where so much of the global workforce is today, what is the function that they are in? Sales is one of the most common. And so if you can go after just sales, and in a way disrupt that global workforce, it’s far larger than things like, I don’t know, support as an example.
And you can apply that to all different functions. Legal is another example, or finance is another example. There are just more salespeople than there are each of those different functional positions in the world.
Turner Novak:
In terms of all these different software categories, there are all these new AI-native products that are getting created. When you talked about customer support, CRM, I feel like there’s a bunch of them. What do you think you’re uniquely doing that specifically makes Monaco stand out compared to what everyone else is trying?
Sam Blond:
Yeah, I think there’s one intuitive application of AI in a platform like Monaco, and that is, within the product you are having agents and effectively paying for compute to do the work that historically humans used to do.
Turner Novak:
So it’s really like putting labor into the software.
Sam Blond:
Yeah. And I think that, especially in enterprise software, is the premise of AI. That’s the intuitive application for AI in Monaco, and we’re certainly doing that, leveraging agents and lots of compute and a lot of the workflows that I just described that are all agent and AI led.
I think the less intuitive thing that we were very deliberate about from early on is the impact that AI has on our ability to build a product quickly, and that manifests in the breadth of the product that we have decided to build. Historically, especially in this category, but I imagine broadly as well, there are lots of point-solution companies.
There’s the conventional wisdom that you find a problem, you build a solution for it, use that as a wedge, and then get really good at that, expand from there. We took the exact opposite approach. And part of this was with the belief that the cost to building software is trending to zero.
So Monaco is a very broad platform. We are not just replacing traditional CRM like the vendors that I alluded to before. We are also replacing as many as we can of the point solutions that historically have integrated over APIs. And we will continue to try and bite off as much as we possibly can in terms of the breadth of the product, because of how much faster we, not just Monaco specifically but technology companies, are able to build software.
And so the more all-in-one, the more deeply integrated, the more that you can accomplish out of the same platform, I think that is better over time. So we started with that mindset from day one by trying to take on a lot. There are others in both the category and more broadly that have started with the narrow approach of, we are the AI this. Like, we are just AI CRM, or we are AI for doing outbound. Something like that.
Turner Novak:
I’ve seen outbound. I’ve seen just follow-ups, like all the calls, and it just automates your follow-ups for you, and there are all these different smaller categories you can build around.
Sam Blond:
And my and our belief is those should be features of a much broader platform and not independent products and companies. Part of why this is true today and hasn’t been true historically is how quickly you can build something like that. So part of our moat is the breadth of the platform that we’ve started with from day one.
Turner Novak:
So the argument is just, it’s so easy to build things, you should be building more. This whole argument of, you need to build all this stuff to make a fully fledged feature suite, everything they need, that’s not that big of a deal because you can just build it really quick.
Sam Blond:
Well, don’t you want to partner with one vendor and have everything that you can get from the same place? And by being end to end with a customer life cycle, you don’t have the issue of data in different silos that you do historically if you have the hub and then a bunch of spokes surrounding that, or a bunch of point solutions surrounding that.
And then you can also leverage complex workflows. If you’re an outbound-only product, you don’t have insight into ACVs, what’s converting, how customers are performing over time. Who did we just close? How should we leverage that data point back at the top of the funnel? By having one data plane and one suite of feature functionality all coming from the same product, there are real tailwinds, you can do things that you can’t with a point solution and hub model.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, because what you could do is, certain messaging is converting best. I’m assuming you can plug this stuff back into, and I think this is a different product at this point, but you can plug it back into the customer service piece of it. What kind of feedback are you getting from customers in the analytics? What product is being used the most in the first 30 minutes in the product?
What’s the heaviest use case? Maybe you need to emphasize that more in outbound or in onboarding. I’m not sure. But I feel like the more you can touch that stuff and incorporate it, it’ll just improve. I feel like you’ve mentioned this before, the two pieces of sales are increasing demand gen and conversion. Anything you do to increase those, that’s the whole point of all this.
Sam Blond:
You nailed that it’s a math equation, right? Revenue, there are three variables. It is opportunities, or number of leads, times conversion rates, times ACV. What is the price? If you want just customer count, you can remove the price. It’s just, how many opportunities are we getting, what is our conversion rate? So that’s the math equation.
And then, tying it back to this “why go broad from the start” concept, there are a couple things. This concept of generating opportunities and increasing conversion rates, they can play off of one another. I’ll give two examples that were, historically, these rev ops insights that required, and I always benefited immensely from having incredible rev ops counterparts, but you didn’t get this level of insight until you had this BCG or McKinsey analyst that came in, who was spending a lot of time running reports on data and different cuts of data, and then trying to extrapolate, does the data match the anecdotes?
And if yes, how do we apply that back? This is pretty sophisticated, the kinds of workflows or outcomes that companies, certainly not the customer bases that we were going after, would not realize until they were a couple hundred employees, historically.
Turner Novak:
Why was it so hard? Was it just because the data was in all these different places and it just wasn’t intuitive to see how they all linked together?
Sam Blond:
The way that this starts is, you have a founder, and they start going after some companies and closing some deals. Then they hire a few salespeople, and they do that same thing, and there are some learnings. And then you hire a sales leader, and that sales leader comes in and starts hiring more salespeople. And it’s not in the DNA of any of the people that I just mentioned to be as thoughtful about things like cutting data in a bunch of different ways and trying to identify trends.
So I’ll give two very specific examples, one from the days of Zenefits and then one from the days of Brex, that we can now learn in near real time. And it’s one of my favorite parts of our product, and as I said to you earlier, I certainly don’t want to make this a Monaco commercial, but I do think this is about how we can leverage AI, whether it’s Monaco or not, in this brave new world. There were things that historically required these really incredible and expensive McKinsey analysts to come in and figure this stuff out.
At Zenefits, we were doing health insurance, and it was regulated by the state. You asked a question like, “Why doesn’t this exist earlier?” Nobody really, you had a bunch of demos that would come on your calendar, and nobody was paying attention to, this demo is in the state of Florida, and what does that mean for the outcome of this demo? Because my next demo is in the state of, I think you grew up in Michigan, and I grew up in Missouri or California.
Turner Novak:
So you just might not be able to legally sell in Missouri, so you cannot even do the demo.
Sam Blond:
Well, it was less about that. It was more, you just never stop to think, is the location of where this company is influencing whether or not they sign up? And what we found was the thing that actually influenced conversion rates more than anything is where the company is headquartered, because of the dynamics of the insurance space and a bunch of other variables that went into this.
So I’ll give another example, and then I’ll talk about how AI can do this and what’s the major takeaway, because this really is a massive acceleration. We are able to bring down things that historically much larger companies were able to get the insights into and then take action on, to much smaller companies today, because AI can look at this stuff far sooner. At Brex, the equivalent of this was, we could sell both to finance and accounting, like controllers.
And kind of the same idea, you would show up for a call, a finance person would be on the other end of the phone. A sales rep wouldn’t take note that I’m talking to a CFO or a VP of finance or an FP&A person, or it could be a controller or chief accounting officer or whatever the accounting profiles might be.
But what we found is, finance people converted at like a 4x rate to controllers. And when we figured that out and understood it, it made perfect sense, because the controllers wanted to go really deep on, how do you map to the expenses, and have these almost technical conversations at an accounting level that sales reps weren’t equipped to have. The finance people were like, “What’s our rebate?” Or, “What’s our credit limit? What’s our rebate? What’s our float?” And those are the types of things that salespeople are quite good at and actually really lean into.
Turner Novak:
Okay.
Sam Blond:
And so the point of all of this is that we can find these things out, because agents today, we have an insights agent, and it is trained to cut data in every possible way, based off of buyer, based off of location, based off of vertical and sub-vertical, based off of segment and sub-segment.
You see when you start to get to statistically significant information that we may want to surface to a customer about the way that their business is performing, and if that learning maps to something that’s either, no, this seems arbitrary, or, yeah, this actually does seem right, you can then apply that back to the very top of the funnel.
And of course, the next step is very logical here. We oriented all of our sales resources around the states that had the highest conversion rates. We oriented all of our first touches into companies into finance personas. And so everything else stays consistent, and you’ve just influenced conversion rates pretty materially by changing the top-of-the-funnel action based off of the insight.
And again, really difficult to accomplish this full workflow if you are just doing the outbound, or if you are just the system of record but you need to go to a third party to orchestrate the outbound. And that’s an advantage that being very broad has from day one.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, because you might just be a great outbounder. That’s your role on the team, you’re doing outbound. You might be really good at it, and there are just so many things that are outside of your influence that you’ll never be as successful as you could, because of one tweak earlier or later in the system that you don’t get to touch, and you don’t even know is there.
Sam Blond:
There’s this age-old debate that I think most people were on the other side of than me, which is, you have a lot of sales resources that are dedicated towards demand gen. Historically, SDRs. They generate demand, they schedule meetings, and there is this age-old debate: do you compensate an SDR based off of the meetings that they are booking, which is something that they have full control over, or do you compensate them based off of the revenue that those meetings generate?
And I land on the side of the revenue that those meetings generate. Maybe it’s not one size fits all, and maybe there’s nuance, you can have some mix of the two. We shouldn’t spend too much time on that specific topic here. That said, I do think that the era of AI allows us to only orient around the outcome that we are driving towards, which is revenue. What are the characteristics of the companies that are closing that we should then apply back to the companies that we are targeting? And not, what are the characteristics of the companies that we can get a meeting with regardless of what happens from there?
Turner Novak:
Yeah, because then you can at least use that downstream data to tailor what goes into the meeting, right? Who’s actually closing, book meetings that are more likely to close.
Sam Blond:
There are really fun things that we can do with this. I can think of specific examples where we had reps that just sold far better to founders than they did to finance people, as an example.
Turner Novak:
You’re saying that maybe they hit it off more, they related better, they knew the problems and could hit on them better?
Sam Blond:
Maybe, in certain instances. They were sort of networky and hosted events and knew a bunch of founders and name-dropped founders. They were in the founder community. And so these insights, in addition to insights at the customer or business-type level, or the persona level, you can get insights at the rep level. Things like, you have reps that are converting certain types of opportunities.
A very common one here is the size of the company. And when you should start segmenting, who should be in which segment, and you can start to get pretty interesting feedback and insights about, did you know that this rep is performing incredibly well here, performing less well here? And then AI can orient, who do we assign this meeting to based off of who has the highest probability of closing it?
Turner Novak:
Interesting. So you can start to dynamically shift your sales team. It’s almost like dynamic pricing in Ubers or airline tickets, but dynamic allocation of the staff, of the team.
Sam Blond:
You can gamify everything. It’s all oriented around outcomes. How can we close the most customers, and how can we close the most revenue? And we do it in a way that is totally objective. It’s not the sales leader favoring someone and giving them more opportunity. It’s all AI.
Turner Novak:
Interesting. Are there any other things that have changed over the past couple years, and are there any major things that have stayed the same?
Sam Blond:
There’s something that’s a little bit dangerous about the introduction of AI into go-to-market. I think probably more so with founders than there is with sales organizations. We speak with a lot of folks and have to reiterate and remind folks, AI is not the silver bullet for go-to-market broadly.
Whether it’s Monaco or any tool out there, it is not like you are automating away go-to-market so that you can then spend your time elsewhere. Most founders are not like me. They’re either a product visionary, highly technical, that sort of thing. So AI is not this silver bullet. And so there’s maybe a risk that you start to leverage AI too much, and you then remove yourself from the incredibly high ROI things that you have to do as a founder.
And so, tying this back to your original question of what has stayed the same: there is no higher ROI use of my time, and I would argue, for founders that are post product-market fit but pre scaling a sales organization, that phase of company building, there is no higher ROI use of my time or founder time more broadly than spending time with customers, being customer-facing.
AI doesn’t automate away having to spend time meeting with either prospective customers or current customers. In fact, the inverse is true. Maybe this is slightly contrarian. AI enables you to spend more time customer-facing. Zoom is great. When you have the opportunity, meet a customer face to face, especially if your deal size is warranted.
We sell to startups in San Francisco. And so oftentimes I, or we, will default when it’s convenient to a meeting. We’re not getting on a plane to go meet with a New York founder for a $25,000 ACV deal. It just doesn’t support it. But if you are a founder selling into mid-market or mid-market plus, into the enterprise, you should err, especially when you’re meeting with a marquee account, just get on the plane. Go meet the customer. That has not changed. And the ROI on that is incredibly high.
And then, here’s the other thing that I touched on earlier. We do a lot of investment in what would be categorized as marketing. Brand marketing, even demand gen marketing. And I think there’s something less intuitive about that spend. People try to get too scientific with measuring the impact of these sorts of things at an early stage.
So I’ll give some specific examples, but then I’ll talk about the actual impact that a company like Monaco realizes, and this is all through the lens of, what is true today that was true historically also, and I think that was the original question. These marketing campaigns, we have billboards going up. We have the launch videos when we do the fundraise announcements or the product launches. We do gifting campaigns where we send people poker sets that are these cool poker sets that, I think for us, we maybe pay a hundred bucks or something like that for them.
We throw these poker tournaments. We call it the Monaco Invitational. Really fun event. Founders love poker tournaments. We give away cash to the winners, and we throw a party. And the obvious outcome of this is something like, how many customers did you sign up that attended your poker event, and what did you spend on the poker event?
What is the ROI there, and is that a channel that you should continue investing in? How much did you pay for the poker sets that you sent to a bunch of founders? How many of those founders signed up? And should you continue doing that stuff? Billboards, it’s a little harder to do the attribution on the billboard stuff.
The thing that I think is less understood, and why we lean into this stuff so much, and I’ll revisit one important nuance here. When we now do outbound to the founders that we’re reaching out to, our reply rates today, same company, same product, same message,
Turner Novak:
This is at Monaco?
Sam Blond:
This is at Monaco today. They are exponentially higher than they were before we launched into our public beta. We were an unknown company the way that, definitionally, all startups are unknown when they first get started. The reason, or a big part of why our reply rates are so high, is because of these brand campaigns that we are doing, where there is now name and brand recognition.
And so there are two things that are far more difficult to quantify when doing something like a gifting campaign, a billboard campaign, an event. What is the impact of that on the efficacy of outbound, on reply rates and meeting rates from people who receive your message? “Oh, I see your billboards everywhere. Oh, I heard about your event. I’d love to come to the next one.” Happy to take a look.
But then also conversion rates, because you have almost inherent credibility. If you have brand recognition, people are talking about you, there is a higher likelihood that somebody feels comfortable and confident moving forward with someone that has a brand that exists out there.
Turner Novak:
And it’s even just, “Hey,” it’s in the group chat. “Hey, we just signed up for Monaco,” or, “We’re thinking about it. I got a demo. Anyone else use it?” And if six other people say, “Oh, I’ve seen their billboards,” or, “I use it,” or, “I went to the poker tournament,” that’s multiple touchpoints that you can’t really measure. You don’t even know those are happening.
Sam Blond:
You nailed it. And so there’s maybe one takeaway, and then one thing that I said I would qualify and revisit, because I think it’s important for me to touch on the final aspect. I get asked the question all the time, how do you measure the impact of the Monaco Invitational poker tournament? How do you measure the impact of the billboards? How do you measure each of the different things that we’re doing, the launch videos that cost money? The real answer is, we don’t.
Turner Novak:
You don’t. You don’t even measure.
Sam Blond:
We do not. And I think my perspective on this is something like, you will spend more time and effort trying to measure, and the outcome of that measurement won’t be accurate, because there’s so much information that you don’t have when you’re trying to do the measurement, that your takeaways will actually guide you in the incorrect direction.
And the anecdotes here are actually more valuable than the data points themselves. And when I say anecdotes, what I mean is the things that people are regularly bringing up to you that they are seeing. And we have failed at some things that we have tried. Here’s an example, and I’m getting a bit rambly, but I’ll go back to it. I think there’s an important qualification.
We did a lot of really incredible, similar creative marketing campaigns at Brex. And a lot of my learnings that I’ve taken to Monaco with me were things that we tried and were successful at Brex. Me and others were trying these different things. One of the things that we did that wasn’t successful was we opened up a restaurant.
Turner Novak:
Oh, it still comes up. People still talk about that.
Sam Blond:
We called it South Park Cafe. It was a co-working space, and it was a real restaurant. It served lunch and dinner. And I don’t know exactly how many employees we were at the time, but let’s call it 50. And the restaurant had 20 or 30 employees. Running a restaurant is hard. The lesson isn’t necessarily, don’t open up the restaurant. The lesson is, you should be trying a bunch of stuff.
Some of this stuff is not going to work. And that was an example where we could just tell it wasn’t driving the impact, from a lot of the anecdotes. And again, Brex did billboards and Brex did a bunch of other things that we’re also leveraging. You kind of know. Over time, if you get into what today is a Brex-size company, or probably even smaller, of course you want to start measuring this stuff. But early on, at the phase of company growth that we are at, we’re about 50 employees today, you just have to try a bunch of stuff, and then you’ll anecdotally understand what is working well. Double and triple down on that stuff. The things that don’t work super well, chalk it up as a win that you were willing to try it. And there’s a learning that you can now cross that one out and move on to another thing that you can try.
Turner Novak:
Personally, one of my best marketing stunts that I ever did, which I always forget about because I didn’t really think about it that much, I did this fake VC pitch competition on TikTok. There’s a feature on TikTok where you could stitch a video or duet a video, you could go side by side. And I made a video of me with a filter messing up my face, a filter messing up my voice, and making it really annoying.
And I pretended to be a VC listening to your pitch, and my questions were like, “What do you do again? Who introduced us? Wait, what’s your TAM?” I was arguing with my gardener on the phone, I think. And it was the classic terrible experience that a founder gets when they’re pitching an investor who just doesn’t care. And there were like 100 people that responded making a pitch of pitching me while I was doing that in the video.
A bunch of people posted it on Twitter, and I don’t know how many views, I’ve never even checked, but it probably got a million views over all the videos and channels. And I always forget that I did that, but that is probably the video that the most people mention. “Oh yeah, I know you do that one, the VC pitch video.” And I’m like, “Oh yeah, I did do that.” I just kind of did it for fun randomly once. It took me like half an hour to do, and I don’t know what the ROI was, but I think it helped.
Sam Blond:
It’s hard to measure, right? But there’s the objective, because that one’s online, there’s the objective, how many likes did it get? How many views did it get? But then there are the anecdotes that are what you just described, which is, people mention to me all the time, “I remember the VC pitch video that you did.” And so it also sounds like it’s lasting. So maybe there’s a 2.0 version of that you could bring back.
Turner Novak:
I should probably do another one. I mean, it was so effective. The one thing I’ve been doing is I’ve been hosting comedy shows where we hire really good comedians. It’s pretty hard to do, but people seem to like those.
Sam Blond:
That’s really smart. One of the things that I do when I hear something like that, I immediately think, oh, we could totally host it.
Turner Novak:
If you like that idea, we should do one, because it’s kind of expensive. I can’t pay for it myself. I have to get people to sponsor it.
Sam Blond:
I’m down.
Turner Novak:
It’s interesting, because most people, you invite them to an event, and it’s a dinner. Maybe it’s a panel with some speakers, and they’re just talking about AI, whatever. You’re like, “Do I really have to go to this?” So I think the poker’s interesting, because people are like, “Oh, I love poker. I’d play.” Or comedy shows, people are like, “I haven’t been to a comedy show in a while.” And the comedians are Netflix-special comedians. You’re like, “Oh, this will probably be fun, bring my girlfriend or bring someone on the team.” So you actually want to go to it, and you remember it.
Sam Blond:
What you just described, or a version of it, you have to do things that are different. You said the dinners. At some scale, it probably matters to host dinners, and you can have a special guest speaker. It’s certainly not that creative. Lots of companies are having dinners, and the bar for a dinner, it has to be some really cool restaurant. I don’t know why people are going to show up otherwise.
But I do think that, and that’s why I took note of the comedy thing. I was like, “Oh, that’s actually a really good idea.” Because people love to laugh. And it is different. You don’t see a lot of startups or VCs or anyone hosting a comedy show. That would be pretty fun. You could even do an iteration on this, and man, we’d have fun planning something like this. We’d do a roast of a prominent figure that’s up for getting made fun of, that I suspect a lot of people might find entertaining. So that’s an idea. And then you can control the show.
There was one thing that I wanted to come back to, that sometimes I forget. I said to you earlier, I don’t do a lot of the podcasts anymore. But one on one I’ll have similar conversations to folks that are in line with the one that we’re having right now. There is something about, “Yeah, but you’ve raised a bunch of money, and everything that you’re talking about is really expensive.” Or, many of the things that you’re talking about are really expensive.
There’s certainly some truth to that. Here’s maybe the qualification. In a world where you are bootstrapped or you have seed-stage capital available to you, where you’re not going to be spending six figures on billboard campaigns and more, I think there’s a bit of a process to follow. But also, certain things can be incredibly effective and not that expensive.
So the process to follow is, every single month force yourself to do, what is our creative idea for the month? You meet with a group, you put stuff up on a whiteboard. You maybe vote on what is the best idea here. Comedy show is a great one. And I suspect a comedy show you could probably do in office. You could probably get a couple between-amateur-and-professional-level comedy folks to come in and do it for not that much money.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, I’m trying to think of what we paid. I think we used Merge’s office. I don’t know if you know Merge in New York City. Merge.dev is the website. They actually may be sponsoring this episode of the podcast. They are our sponsor. And then we had my friend Alexis Gay. I don’t know if you know her. She’s kind of like a professional corporate comedian.
Sam Blond:
Yes.
Turner Novak:
She does B2B comedy.
Sam Blond:
I see her on Twitter a lot. Funny stuff.
Turner Novak:
She’s really funny.
Sam Blond:
Impersonations, I think, a lot, right?
Turner Novak:
Yeah. And so she helped me plan and run it, and then helped me get some friends that were kind of amateur-ish, but pretty good. We had people who worked at some tech companies that were comedians on the side that volunteered. I think we paid them a little bit, but it wasn’t a ton. The very first one we did was in an office. We basically just paid for food and a little bit for the comedians. But it was really, really reasonable. It was maybe a couple grand total.
Sam Blond:
It’s a perfect example of something that you can do that’s really fun, and maybe we should do a version of it. We did the poker sets. And I think the trade-off here is, there are maybe two things that you should orient around when you don’t have a huge budget on a campaign.
The first is, really creative and sometimes operationally complex. Because the things that cost a lot of money, the third-party advertiser stuff, paid ads, billboards, those are pretty easy. Pretty easy to put up billboards, pretty easy to put up paid ads and pay Google a lot to surface this to somebody who maybe Googled something that you wanted.
Turner Novak:
It’s just you literally putting your credit card in,
Sam Blond:
Credit card and pressing buttons. That’s exactly right. And it does it. And that is why everybody is doing it. So force yourself to try and come up with these creative things. We did the poker sets. The retail on them was maybe 180 bucks and we paid 100 bucks for them, but if you send those to 100 different founders, you’re at $10,000 of spend. And it’s very targeted, and you’re giving something that’s kind of cool to somebody.
So it’s not free, but $10,000 to target 100 of the best potential customers that you can acquire, gosh, if you try to do that on LinkedIn or on Google, that money goes by very, very fast. And this stands out in such a way. Imagine you as the recipient of that poker set. Would you rather have the person that’s advertising to you pay Google to track you and surface their ad, or do you want the poker set? You want the poker set. So do things that stand out. It doesn’t have to totally break the bank. You can set budgets when you come up with these creative ideas. I think the worst thing to do is nothing at all. Just try stuff.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, and it’s interesting too, with the physical thing versus the Google ads, I’m sure I have gotten ads I just don’t remember. I just don’t even remember seeing them in my feed, or when I’m searching. Versus if I literally got a poker set, a big package, and I opened it up, whether I used it or not, I’ll just remember that that happened.
I may throw it out. I may say, “I hate poker,” or whatever, but I will always remember that I got shipped this thing. I have people that send me stuff now, and my wife jokes on me. There’s this one guy who just keeps sending me stuff, and my wife is in on it now. My wife knows about it because it’s so memorable. And I don’t even remember what it is, it could probably be a better thing that the person sends me, but I talk about it to people.
Sam Blond:
Yeah. You just said something that was really insightful, which was, the thing could be better. I have maybe a cliche saying, which is, it’s not the thought that counts. With the gift, do not send a T-shirt with your startup logo on the T-shirt to somebody that you want to sell to. The gift actually does matter. The thing that you’re sending to somebody, in a way it could be negative value if the thing is some tchotchke that’s super, you know. It could have the opposite effect that you wanted.
So actually do be thoughtful about the thing that you are sending to somebody. And I think the bar is actually quite high, where it’s something like, would you think that this is cool, genuinely cool, not because you’re the one doing it and you’re inherently biased?
And then the only other thing, maybe as a takeaway, would be, try and do a little bit of a thought exercise, and you can actually measure this. If you think about all of the dollars that you’re attributing to marketing spend,
Turner Novak:
Yep.
Sam Blond:
Try and have some meaningful percentage, could be 50%, could be 30%, that you label as directly benefiting the target customer, versus a third-party advertiser. So this is gifting. This is the poker tournament that we are hosting. That would definitely be in the category of beneficial to prospective people, they come, they have a great time. That’s way better than putting up a bunch of billboards, which we also do.
But again, just a bit of a thought exercise or framework: how many of the dollars that we’re spending on marketing directly benefit the people that we are marketing to, versus benefiting the third-party advertisers that are marketing to them?
Turner Novak:
One of my favorites on this is a company called Greptile. It’s AI code review. What he did is he sent Greptile-branded energy drinks to engineers. It’s super tangible. “Hey, you’re up all night coding. Just drink some Greptile energy drink, and then maybe check out the code review.”
Sam Blond:
And they’ll probably use it. Greptile’s great. Daksh is the CEO.
Turner Novak:
Yep.
Sam Blond:
They’re a Monaco customer, so it’s awesome.
Turner Novak:
Oh, amazing. That’s cool. Hopefully they have a good revenue engine that they’ve got going now on the Monaco platform.
Sam Blond:
They seem to be crushing it.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, that’s what I’ve heard. One thing I wanted to ask you, even when we were thinking about all this branding and general stuff like that, should you be doing this before you have a product, and even, should you be doing it before you have any customers? What’s the order of, should you just talk to customers first, and then this informs all this stuff? What order should you be doing all this?
Sam Blond:
So this is one where I will speak to the n of one experience of building Monaco.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, maybe that’d be interesting, what did you do?
Sam Blond:
What we did, and let me qualify this with something. Unlike, I think, a lot of the sales topics, customer acquisition, those sorts of things, I have less experience on the, when do you start to do some brand spend, and, as you’re developing your product, are you spending anything? So I’ll just tell you what we did, with that qualification.
So we were building for maybe about a year. We deliberately built in stealth. During that year, the one thing that we were doing that gave us growing confidence in what we were building towards is just pretty regular customer interview and feedback sessions. We would schedule a discovery call. We would pitch a little bit what we were building towards, get people’s feedback. Could be a founder. It could be a salesperson. Just get feedback on the concept.
Turner Novak:
This was with existing customers or potential?
Sam Blond:
We didn’t have a product to sell. It was just discovery with the potential customer base. It was educational. But at a minimum, it reinforced and gave us more confidence that we were building in the right direction.
I do think, going back to this, we built a very broad compound startup. We’re replacing a bunch of different tools. And that is one of the downsides of doing that, it takes a little bit longer to build, even in the world of AI and code gen tools. And so we didn’t want to be building in the dark for a year. As we were building, we were just getting feedback from ultimately potential customers, doing things like discovery calls.
We then, we didn’t charge. This is a little bit contrarian, but during the design customer phase, which was about six months of time, where we picked let’s call it 15-ish design partners, we had a product that they could start using. It certainly wasn’t the quality bar to launch. And the real value for our business during that design phase was improving the product. It wasn’t the ability to generate revenue.
So we onboarded these 15 design customers. We actually didn’t want to charge, because it would’ve been friction in getting the thing that we really wanted, which was a bunch of the feedback. We did, though, have to get people to commit that they actually would make this their platform of record. They wouldn’t use this alongside another tool. So we got buy-in and commitment that we were going to build this together during the design customer phase.
Turner Novak:
Okay. So they weren’t on it yet, but they’d promised you in three months when it’s ready they would switch over.
Sam Blond:
They switched over when it was ready for the design phase. It was rough around the edges. But we also had services that accompanied it. They agreed to partner with us. We didn’t charge them. And up until our public beta launch, which was in February, we were operating in this stealth mode, partnering with design partners, not charging them for using the product, getting a bunch of feedback, getting the product from day one of the design customer phase to when we were going to launch.
We spent $0 on marketing. We were doing outbound to test the product and maybe acquire some of those design customers. All of the design customers were either through Monaco or through introductions. Investors, employees, just personal networks. And then we really wanted to do the coming-out-of-stealth launch. And that is when we switched from zero investment on anything brand related, and in fact invested in not having a brand, meaning all of our LinkedIns said “company in stealth” instead of what the company was even called. Our website said “coming soon.” So you went to monaco.com, it was just literally “coming soon.”
And then we wanted to do the zero to 100 shotgun-blast style, which was, on the day that we launched, which was February 11, all sorts of stuff happens. You get the delivery of your poker sets, and billboards go up, and we have the launch video, and tons of outbound is going out. Everything coming together all at the same time. And going from totally unknown to, hopefully, some level of brand recognition in our target market, as fast as we possibly could. That was the mindset shift.
Turner Novak:
Okay, so why do that zero to 100? I feel like a lot of people, they’ll post publicly, “Hey, we’re not launched yet, looking for design customers.” The website will be there, but they haven’t really put much demand gen behind it. Maybe some investors have it listed on their website, but again, they’re not a big launch. So why’d you go from literally stealth to two to 100?
Sam Blond:
Yeah. Well, I’ll tell you maybe a reason not to. And this is probably the wrong approach for most people and companies, meaning the zero to 100, stay in stealth for as long as you can, and then do a big bang with your launch. I think something that enabled us to do that, and this was true both at Brex for different reasons and for us now at Monaco, was, we didn’t need to be known to acquire the initial set of customers that we needed to get the product to the level of sophistication to launch.
At Brex, Brex was a YC company. The reason Brex was Brex is because their batchmates couldn’t get credit cards. There were a lot of international folks, younger people that didn’t have a lot of credit history. And so in a lot of ways, Brex built the initial product for their batch. And so you don’t need to be well-known for that. And then the next batch is the same idea. It was very early to market. So Brex, for let’s call it six months, was able to build in stealth because of the word of mouth that enabled them to acquire design customers before this big public launch.
For us, the outbound was working. I had the ability to offer to be a bit of a go-to-market advisor to some of the customers that signed up as design partners. That’s something that’s a little bit unique to me and a complementary skill set to the founders that we’re working with, that many founders don’t have that capability.
So if you don’t have the ability to acquire a set of design customers through network effects or some way that is different than actually being known, it’s going to be very difficult for you to get people to agree to use your service if you don’t have a website, as an example. So that was a luxury that we had at Brex and we have at Monaco also.
I think the benefit of doing it is, maybe this isn’t the perfect analogy, but the frog in boiling water that doesn’t totally notice as the temperature rises just a little bit. And for context, Monaco launched about three months ago. You can imagine if we had spread this out over the preceding nine months, when we were in the design customer phase, to today, you lose the “all of a sudden I’m seeing this thing everywhere.” Which, again, the probably imperfect analogy is the frog in potentially boiling water.
There’s some real benefit to, and I think maybe the outcome of that is, everything orients around growth right now. You’re able to go from zero to very fast growth. Versus if you had started in the design customer phase, you have a website, you start posting on social, the clock is ticking a little bit longer. It’s harder to make a big splash when you come out. People have kind of already heard of you. So for us, the real benefit was, our growth trajectory went like this instead of like this.
Turner Novak:
And I think too, just speaking from my own personal experience, there are probably quite a few products where you see them when they first start working out. They launch and you’re like, “That’s not that great, honestly.” You’re like, “It’s kind of cool, but whatever.” You kind of skip past it, and that’s the perception you have. And it might be a year later and it’s a great product, and I’ve never noticed because I just remember it for that very first thing that wasn’t that good.
And maybe I wasn’t the target customer or whatever, but I feel like that’s also the other downside to this. Or the upside of it. I remember when you launched, I remember seeing it and I remember thinking, “Oh, this is pretty good.” That was my thinking when I saw the product. I was like, “Oh, this looks really robust.” To your point, it has a couple different features. I’ve seen people build AI-native sales companies and products around all in one. And then of course all the other things that went into the launch. But just seeing the product, I remember thinking, “Oh, this is pretty good.”
Sam Blond:
Well, thank you for the compliment. Yeah, I think it’s so subjective. There’s another topic that is, how do you know when you’re ready to launch?
Turner Novak:
Yeah. So how did you know?
Sam Blond:
There’s another one of those where it was like the marketing example where we don’t measure it. We just thought we were ready. It’s a sensation. We think about company building in different phases. We did the design customer phase. We felt like we had reached a level of quality and impact that we could go into a public beta. So it was private beta when we were doing design customers. We’re now in this phase of public beta. What does public beta mean? It’s, we’re metering who comes in. There’s a wait list for companies that aren’t right in the strike zone of who we think we can be really successful partnering with.
And then we will GA. So I think this public beta phase probably bought us some time and goodwill to start to get brand recognition, but also have the folks that we’re working with understand that we’re still pretty early. We’re a public beta product, and GA should come in July. I think that is what we should really earn our reputation around. We’re in the fortunate position that we have incredible customers that really love us, and I think actually most of our revenue today comes from referrals, which is maybe the data point that suggests that more than anything.
Turner Novak:
Can you walk us through the launch playbook? I know you posted about it. We’ll throw a link in the description if people just want to read it. Maybe they can follow along while you’re talking through it, but what was the playbook that you used to launch?
Sam Blond:
Yeah. I think there’s one table-stakes thing that everyone should do. And if you don’t, it’s just a missed opportunity. And maybe even before I get there, you can launch a bunch of times.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, that’s actually one of my favorite things, when someone’s like, “We’re launching again.”
Sam Blond:
You don’t even have to say “again.”
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Sam Blond:
So we did our public beta launch, and we had a very product-centric video, and we announced our Series A funding. That probably helped amplify that and certainly earned us some of the media. I think TechCrunch did the A. We did the Series B announcement, which almost came off like a launch. It wasn’t. It was just a Series B announcement.
Turner Novak:
This was a couple weeks ago, right?
Sam Blond:
Yeah, it was a few weeks ago. And we are going to do our GA launch. This is all within a span of, we’re talking about February 11 to mid-July. So this is in a span of about five months, and we’re three launches in. So maybe that’s the first qualification: launch. Do a product launch. Do a fundraise launch. Just keep taking advantage of these point-in-time opportunities that you can get attention and amplification around, the company and what’s happening.
And then the table-stakes thing is, especially with the product launch, I like the video. I like the format of a video. And then you want to have a deliberate social media strategy around doing the launch video, and then how are we getting the distribution? So first is on the content side, what is the post? What is the video? That matters.
What matters equally as much is the distribution. The way that we do this is, you get a spreadsheet. You have a few different tabs on the spreadsheet. You have employees, investors, friends of the firm, and customers. Those might be your four tabs. And then when you do your launch, you track, and certainly have outreach, both the day before and the day of, to each of the different people in these categories.
One thing with employees is, you probably want to ask people, “Who are the three to five most influential people that you have in your network, or that you used to work with, or that have the largest followings?” And add those to the friends-of-the-firm tab. But you do want to be deliberate about this distribution on top of just, what is the launch thing. They’re sort of equally important. That, I think, is the table-stakes thing to do. And everyone should be doing that.
I do like the launch campaigns. We did a few. We did, I’ve talked about it a few times, the poker sets that we delivered. We had trucks that were driving around San Francisco that had the LED sides and the LED backs to the trucks.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, what’s the, can you tell the story there real quick? I think it was a hangover from the Super Bowl kind of a thing.
Sam Blond:
Yeah, the story was, I was out for a run, or probably more realistically a walk, on the Saturday before the Super Bowl. And there were, as far as the eye could see, these LED box trucks that I’d never seen in San Francisco before. Maybe they exist for conferences or something, but I’d really never seen this.
Turner Novak:
So this is a truck that has a screen, an LED screen, that flicks the message?
Sam Blond:
Both sides and the back. Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Okay.
Sam Blond:
And it was all gambling stuff. It was all whatever, DraftKings. I don’t know the specific advertisers, but it makes sense. It’s the Super Bowl. So it was all these gaming companies that were advertising on these trucks. And we were launching, we launched on February 11, so I think that was the Wednesday following the Super Bowl. And I went across the street and just met one of the truck drivers and asked him, “Are you guys here this week?” He was like, “Here’s the card for the company.”
So anyway, I started calling around to some of these companies, and we took advantage of this excess inventory that was already in San Francisco. So I don’t know what the regular price of this stuff would’ve been, but maybe it was just, literally the Saturday before launch we fell into even doing this campaign, because I was walking around and I saw a bunch of these trucks. And then we benefited, I think financially, from the inventory that was already here around the Super Bowl.
Turner Novak:
That was unused. It would’ve been used anyways.
Sam Blond:
Well, yeah, when you do it organically, had we done this without the trucks being here for the Super Bowl, they’ve got to drive in from Vegas or LA or wherever. It’s probably more common to have the trucks driving around. There are expenses associated with that, and it makes sense. They have direct costs for the drivers and everything to get up here. So we got a crazy discount rate to have folks that were in the trucks that stayed here.
Outside of that, the process, and I mentioned this, and I’ve done this with a few of our customers, but I mentioned it in a different format. When you get ready for the launch, like 45 days before the launch, get the company together. Your company might be five people. Or just get the five people in the company where this makes the most sense. Have that be the launch committee.
Maybe you meet on a Friday afternoon for lunch or happy hour, and then the weekend assignment is, “All right, everybody come up with two to three ideas for our launch.” And in a lot of ways, the crazier the better. Nothing is off limits. You may want to establish some budget constraints. You may be like, “Look, we can’t spend more than X amount of dollars on each individual campaign.” But then you’ve got five people. Each person comes in. They whiteboard what the creative idea is to amplify the launch, and then you’re all sitting around, and you leave the room with maybe three or four that you think are the best ideas that you can then do.
Turner Novak:
And these are usually offline, or non-related to the specific launch post?
Sam Blond:
Generally separate from the launch post. There’s this customer of ours who we love, and they’re in some of our videos, mutual customer, we also use their product, called Judgment Labs. And Judgment Labs had their launch, and they receive all of the credit, but we did a couple workshops where I came into their office. And they did an ice cream truck that they wrapped with Judgment Labs branding. They named ice cream flavors after some of their customers. And they had different locations, and then they gave out free ice cream, and they had a bunch of posts about it. That was one of their ideas.
I’ll say one other thing that they did, and hopefully this is helpful to pattern match to. I’m not suggesting that an ice cream truck is the thing that all customers should do. You want to do things that are new, creative, stand out, take some risk. Another thing that they did that I thought was really clever, which was an iteration off of, or a version of, our poker sets, which were on brand for Monaco. Literally branded Monaco, because Monaco has a casino, and so we ordered prefab Monaco poker sets.
They did this really cool thing where they sent 3D picture frames with Legos that were built of the company. It was Monaco’s logo in the 3D picture frame built out of Legos. And we’re hanging that in the front entrance to the office. You see it every single day. And I don’t know exactly what they would’ve spent on it. My guess is not totally different from the 100 bucks that we spent on the poker sets. And so you do that, maybe do 50, maybe do 100. I don’t know the exact number, but it’s a reasonable marketing spend. Just try stuff like that. Those are the types of ideas that you may come away with.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, that’s, there’s a venture fund, it’s called Shrug Capital, if you ever come across Niv Dror. They almost do stunt marketing. They almost do meme marketing, but they have a lot of physical products. And one of the things Niv told me that I’ve always kind of hung with is, you want to gift something that they will stick somewhere and look at. So he would do a keyboard mat that went under your keyboard.
They did a calendar. This really big thing was called the Shrug Calendar, and I think every day, it was one of those little flip desk calendars, every day there was a tweet from someone that was either something funny that happened on that day, or a stat of some kind. I can’t even remember exactly what he did, but the thing was, you just set it on your desk and every day you see this calendar. So I feel like that’s one thing I’ve always thought about, just the physical, you put it up somewhere and you always look at it. I have mugs that I use, and I’ll always remember who gave me the mug.
Sam Blond:
It’s cool and it’s smart. Judgment Labs did a better version, and some of the examples that you just gave are probably better versions of what we did. Our idea was, startups have poker nights, and so they’re going to break this out, and every time they break it out, it’s going to be the Monaco chips, and there’s going to be, “Oh, Monaco, the company, gave us this thing.”
The Judgment Labs thing, you see it every day when you walk in, similar to what you just described. It was the keyboard mat. It’s a good theme. I think the other theme, the thing that we did at Brex that was really effective in the same vein, was we sent bottles of Veuve Clicquot champagne, which is like $50 a bottle.
Turner Novak:
But it’s kind of fancy champagne, right?
Sam Blond:
Certainly perceived as very high-end champagne that, even, there are a lot of people that are drinking less and those sorts of things. You still know somebody who’s going to drink this bottle of champagne. It will get used. And so there are two reasons why it was super effective, and this is one that you can kind of copy. I think it can be reused.
The reasons that I think it was effective: one, we oriented it around congratulations on a fundraise. And there’s a reason. It’s celebratory champagne, and it was on brand for, within the last month or six months they had raised funding, so it’s like, congratulations, a heartfelt thing. And then the other thing is, it’s social. So I think in the card, that was from Henrique probably, who is co-founder and CEO at Brex, it was probably like, “Hope you’re able to enjoy some nice champagne with the team,” to celebrate. So then you bring the team around. “Brex sent us this champagne,” and so it’s social and you’re telling other people about it. So that’ll get consumed, which is different, and one-time use, but something else that was effective.
Turner Novak:
So was there a relation between poker and Monaco, and maybe why poker? Why’d you call it Monaco? Was there any thinking around this, or do you just like the word? Do you like poker?
Sam Blond:
The poker was maybe secondary. Monaco, man, naming a company is hard, and it’s also not a social activity. What I mean is, don’t get four people in a room and try and come up with a name. It’s so subjective. I know you have children. It’s like naming kids. You and your partner should come up with the best name for your children, and probably not socialize that with a bunch of different people, because they’re going to have differing opinions. And I think names, company names,
Turner Novak:
There’s literally apps where, it’s almost like Tinder, but for baby names. You and your partner both get it and you swipe yes or no. People go so intense on this stuff.
Sam Blond:
And it’s hard, and it’s subjective. And so we were, or I was, I guess I sort of took ownership of naming the company.
Turner Novak:
Okay.
Sam Blond:
I was thinking through words that people associated with some combination of luxury, success, these different categories. And then eventually got into geographic locations. Thought of Monaco. I like the word Monaco, it’s a nice sounding word. And then one of the big things was, the .com was available.
Turner Novak:
It was available? Like someone had it for sale?
Sam Blond:
It was unused. And after very little diligence, we understood that there would be an opportunity eventually to acquire monaco.com. So that was a big part of the calculation. But the framework was, success, the things that we wanted to be associated with as a brand. It was success, wealth, those sorts of things, and I think Monaco ties nicely into that. Now Monaco, there are a lot of things that we can do as French Riviera that are on brand with Monaco. And then there’s the casino that it’s well known for, so we can do the poker tournament. So there are a lot of things that we can do with the brand itself.
Turner Novak:
That’s fair. I had a similar naming maze with Banana Capital. You try to come up with a company name, every good idea you have, it’s taken. There’s literally no options out there, specifically with investment firms, not just venture, but real estate, hedge funds. Every good name is taken.
So my wife, it was probably after a good eight hours literally all in of just coming up with names, looking them up, and being like, “Man, this is taken.” My wife was like, “Well, Apple’s the most valuable company in the world. What if you name it after a fruit?” And I was like, “Man, that’s so smart, because with the geographic location, nobody’s naming things after geographic locations or fruits.”
So then it was like, okay, well, banana, I kind of think it’s a cool word. Banana Capital, I don’t know. It can be very bold, like Benchmark, Sequoia, Banana. I don’t know if I’m quite at that level yet, but it’s a word. But also, it’s kind of funny too, just Banana Capital, like, is this real? So it hit kind of everything I was going for.
Sam Blond:
I wouldn’t say this if it weren’t true. If I didn’t like the name, I just wouldn’t say anything. I really like the name. And you actually took the words out of my mouth. It’s a cool word. Just saying “banana” rolls off the tongue. Anyway, I think it definitely stands out. To your point, a lot of times last names, those sorts of things, are the investor names. And so it’s memorable.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I feel like maybe a16z did a good job with the last names. They made it a little sexier. a16z, you search that, it shows up. Banana, I don’t know if I’m ever going to win the SEO for Banana, but Monaco, I think we were just talking, you guys have the first or second result now when you search Monaco, which is pretty crazy. You’re beating a country.
Sam Blond:
The .com is probably helpful.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, fair.
Sam Blond:
That was not a consideration. As you and I were saying before, maybe it should have been. But I do think that if people want to find us, they can, regardless of where we stack rank with Monaco. We’re sitting here less than four months after, talking about this phase of the company where we were stealth, to public launch. And we’re already sort of up there.
Turner Novak:
Also, does it really matter? If I vaguely am familiar with Monaco, I knew it’s software for sales, and I’m Googling it, and, oh, I click the Wikipedia page for the country. You’re not going to get tricked and find the wrong thing. One of them is a country, a customs thing, and one is literally the sales software, and then another thing related to the country. You’re going to find it if you’re searching for it.
Sam Blond:
Especially if you add in another word. But I have heard zero times, “We had trouble finding you online.” And I do think that we have a bunch of campaigns up right now where you don’t know what Monaco or monaco.com is. And so it just directs people to the website. So the traffic that we are getting right now is pretty crazy for a three-month, four-month-old startup from public launch.
Turner Novak:
Interesting. And so, we’ve talked quite a bit about outbound. Actually, maybe not enough. We talked about a lot of pre-launch outbound. So how does outbound change after you launch? You said that a lot of things became more effective after you’d been out there publicly. So how do you think about outbound now?
Sam Blond:
Well, this is one where the opinions that I will express here are ingrained into the platform itself. But when you get started, there are a few things that matter. Who is sending the outbound is actually something that’s very important. At startups, even at startups that have early salespeople, you want the origination of the outbound to come from the founder, because founders are going to get higher reply rates than early salespeople, because the recipients of that, they know they’re going to get sold to if it’s a salesperson.
Here are a couple other things that matter, and then I’ll talk about where it starts to evolve. The other things that matter are timing, and also the mediums that you’re reaching out to people. You want to be multi-channel. You want to be at least LinkedIn and email, not just spray the universe with a cold outbound email through domains that aren’t actually your real domain. You’re going to have far better efficacy if you are multi-channel at the same time as part of the same sequence.
And then the message and sequence structure really matter. How many touchpoints are there? How is the message structured itself? Those are things that, again, nothing that we are doing is necessarily earth-shattering, but it is already set up for you. And then over time, what starts to happen is, you can expand outside of the founders that are sending the outbound.
You potentially want to be targeted and certainly thoughtful about prioritizing companies that meet certain characteristics. So for us, we’re primarily orienting around San Francisco-based founders, as an example, and that plays into a lot of the campaigns that we have around San Francisco right now.
Turner Novak:
Well, so why was having the founder send the message so important?
Sam Blond:
It’s because, if you think about it, you’re multi-channel. So if you’re starting over LinkedIn, you can click and see who is originating the message. Oh, it’s the CEO of Monaco. It gives credibility to the person that’s reaching out. And I think that’s probably the biggest thing.
Turner Novak:
So the biggest reason the founder should do it is that they know that it’s the highest, most trusted person at that company. Maybe it’s a founder-to-founder type thing, not necessarily “I’m selling you something” even though it really is, but maybe it’s more of a trusted sale. Or maybe you’ll learn something by talking to this other founder. They’ll get you more.
Sam Blond:
You can also be more creative with messaging. One of our customers is called Parley. They’re a YC company that does AI for immigration law. And so they’re selling into immigration law firms. And so Phil, who’s the CEO, the message structure says something like, “I started Parley after watching my father for years,” and could say something like, and I don’t know if this is literal, but, missing a family event because he was in docs. Anyway, you can see where I’m going with this.
Turner Novak:
So super relatable, versus it being a salesperson, who could probably not say that.
Sam Blond:
That is exactly right. So you can orient the message coming from a founder about the origination story of the company. So there’s this layer of credibility, but there’s also what do you put in the message itself that only a founder can do and articulate, that will lead to significantly higher reply rates.
Turner Novak:
And I think a lot of people listening to this, they can probably all sympathize with the AI email inbound slop that is out there. How should I be navigating that if I’m the one that’s sending the AI-generated emails? How do you get around people immediately just not even opening your email and deleting it?
Sam Blond:
For sure. Here’s how I think about this as maybe an evolutionary thing. There’s the sort of old movie, I don’t know, probably ‘80s, Glengarry Glen Ross. And they were using a Yellow Pages to cold call, and there were the quality leads that they always wanted to get to but they couldn’t get to. So anyway, maybe I’m going too deep in the movie itself. But from many, many decades ago, this concept of identifying a potential buyer based off of their company or who they are, the individual, and then trying to target them to get them to buy your thing.
It has existed for many, many decades certainly. And it has evolved from the Yellow Pages of Glengarry Glen Ross where people might make phone calls. Prior to that I’m sure it was door-knocking. And then you’ve got the innovation around email. So email comes on market. When I joined EchoSign, it was pre, and I’ll get to the point, it was pre-SDR-outreach-type tools. Outreach and SalesLoft and some of those style tools that allowed SDRs to almost do marketing automation the way that a Marketo enabled prior to that.
Turner Novak:
So every email you got was literally handwritten by someone, most likely?
Sam Blond:
Most likely hand-sent. Certainly the ones that I was doing in 2007, 2008. It was copy/paste. The body maybe stays the same, and then I’ll plug in “Hi Turner” or something at the top, and then I’ll copy it, I’ll paste it, and then I’ll do it again over and over again. And then there was outreach, I think it was early or the first to do the marketing automation from an SDR. And so, gosh, I was able to send 200 a day just by throwing new contacts into a sequence, and I didn’t have to do this copy/paste one-off send thing.
And so the point of all of this is, I think this concept of outbound, and there was this meme for a little while, “outbound is dead.” Cold email might be dead, those sorts of things. It is not dead. I think it is evolving, and I do think that if you just drop thousands of email addresses in an outbound email thing with the same templated copy, and that’s your outbound strategy, and you have no brand, the person you’re reaching out to doesn’t know you personally, they’ve never heard of your company, your website kind of sucks, they’re not going to reply to that email. Your reply rates are going to be 0.0-whatever percent.
And so there is an approach that is effective today. I don’t want to talk my own book too much in terms of Monaco, but the reply rates that we are seeing are higher than I ever saw with the outreach-style outbound. And it is leveraging AI. It is leveraging intent signals on why you reach out to somebody, what you say, it’s a custom message. It will be different in 2030. There’ll be something. So you just have to stay up with the times.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, the thing that I see a lot is, I see the “quick question” as the subject, and I don’t really read them all anymore, but that used to get me all the time. Lowercase in the subject just generally seems to work pretty well.
Sam Blond:
RE. The forward, like it’s a reply?
Turner Novak:
Oh, yeah. Like a reply. Yeah, those kind of do well. Anything where it doesn’t seem like it’s an AI-generated email, and I open them like, “Damn, they got me again.”
Sam Blond:
Yeah, I think the multi-channel thing really matters.
Turner Novak:
So multi-channel is like, you message them on LinkedIn and you email them?
Sam Blond:
Yes. And maybe depending on the industry, you also either yourself call them, or you can have a service call them, so there can be a third channel. Gifting could be a fourth channel. We’ve talked about the keyboard pads and those sorts of things. So the multi-channel really matters. And certainly the table-stakes ones are LinkedIn and email. It’s not one plus one equals two. It’s one plus one equals four. But you can say something like, “Following up from my message on LinkedIn,” and then they’re kind of like, “Oh, I did see this person’s message on LinkedIn.” So you tie it all back together.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, I feel like one of the big mistakes too is, you just keep following up on email, and you’re just like, “Hey, just following up. Did you see this? Hey, just following up. Wondered if you wanted to chat?” I feel like it could work, but I feel like the better one is, “Hey, we just launched a new feature. Check it out.” You just don’t even acknowledge that you’re just following up. You’re just continuing to add value in some way.
Sam Blond:
“Any thoughts, question mark.”
Turner Novak:
Is that a bad one or a good one?
Sam Blond:
Oh, I was piggybacking off what you said, which is, not a good one. Sometimes that will work, but I think at this stage of the game, reaching diminishing returns. Everyone knows that that is automated. You don’t feel the psychological impact of, “Oh, this person keeps reaching out to me. I should let them know.” It’s not real.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, I feel like usually I will respond to those if it’s someone that I know in person and know I will probably talk to again in person in some way, and I’m just not interested. But otherwise, I’m never going to respond to you, because you could be fake. And a lot of times you’ll see someone will make up a fake, I’ve seen this, actually, people bragging about this. Their lead gen strategy is, on LinkedIn, attractive woman, you’re messaging founders, and the reply rate is a lot higher. I just know it’s a fake person. They don’t even exist, so it doesn’t even matter what you say.
Sam Blond:
All of the AI SDRs look the way they do for a specific reason.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Sam Blond:
There are things, though, that really do work. And interestingly, there’s probably some moral or lesson in this, but they work because they’re actually relevant. What I mean is, here are a couple examples of intent signals that you might pick up on that actually benefit the recipient of the email. There’s a lot of, “I see you have a job posting for this role.” We actually automate what that role does. Here could be an executive assistant. Somebody may have a job posting for an executive assistant. That would be a reasonable time for an AI executive assistant company to reach out and be like, “Hey, saw this posting,” with maybe a hyperlink to the job posting. “Do you want to try us for one week for free? And if we don’t work, you just keep your job search going.”
Turner Novak:
Yeah, just hire an EA.
Sam Blond:
That will convert. It won’t convert 100% of the time, but it’ll certainly convert more than just randomly blasting everybody to see if they want your AI EA. I’ll give another example, and there are a bunch of these, and maybe the takeaway is you should be leveraging these if you’re a founder of a company. We have a customer called Nowadays that does AI event planning. And one of the intent signals is something like, “Agent, crawl the internet and see if you can find a blog post about a company kickoff or a recent offsite that they had.” And then it’s, “Hey, saw your blog post. We can help you plan the next one.” So not only are you reaching out to the right person at the company that planned the thing, but it’s also top of mind. They have a blog post about it, so people read it. Those dramatically increase the likelihood of somebody replying relative to, I’m going to send 10,000 emails to everyone in my TAM with the same message.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. One thing that always gets me, and I know that a lot of it’s just that tactic, is, people say that they really, “Oh, I listened to your podcast episode with Sam. It was really good. I liked the conversation about intent signals and timing of when to reach out to people. Really liked that part.” And then they jump into their thing, and they suck up to you. They compliment you. You’re like, “Oh man, I’ve got to respond to this at least, or at least acknowledge it.”
Sam Blond:
I receive those also. I think maybe better than a template, depending on the thing. When it works is when the personalization is relevant. So in other words, like I talked about, “Hey, I see you’re job posting for an EA.”
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Sam Blond:
We are literally an AI EA.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, we’re literally solving the problem for you.
Sam Blond:
That’s right. The alternative would be something like, and we’ve talked about where we’re from a few times in the conversation, “Hey, saw you’re from Kansas City. Go Chiefs. Are you thinking about finance workflow automation?” That one I actually am more averse to than the, “Just tell me about the finance thing that you build.”
Turner Novak:
Yeah, like the random, “Hey, I also have a brother who went to Alabama University. I love watching Nick Saban interviews,” whatever, and then you jump in. It’s like, what’s the relevance of that?
Sam Blond:
Totally random thing.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. So in terms of when you’re going from founder-led sales to a system, where you have other people on the team, I don’t know how relevant it is to talk about actually hiring other people right now, maybe this is the answer to the question, but where do you see founders most mess up the systematizing, their initial duct-taping it all together? They start to have a team. It starts to go from, it’s a startup, to, this is a company, we’re building this machine. Where’s the biggest mistake you see people do?
Sam Blond:
Let’s do, maybe in sequential order, which is, we have zero customers. I have seen, a handful of times, founders struggling to acquire customer number one, or a very early customer, and assign attribution of that to, “I don’t know how to sell. I’m not a salesperson, so I’m going to go hire a salesperson.” That is the wrong diagnosis, and that is the wrong solution.
There’s no one better in the world at acquiring the first small handful of customers than the founder themselves. So if you’re not acquiring customers, maybe you want to shift things a little bit in how you present the product, but it is likely a product-market fit thing. And if you can’t do it, then a random third-party salesperson isn’t going to come in and be able to change that for you. So I think that is the earliest mistake that someone might make.
This is maybe true beyond the next phase that I would describe, but seemingly the bottleneck for acquiring customers in, let’s call it four out of five to nine out of 10 companies, is demand gen. It’s opportunity creation. And my intuition is something like four out of five to nine out of 10, either founders or early sales folks or sales leaders, actually misdiagnose the bottleneck to be conversion rates.
And I think a way to understand, or a symptom of this, is something like, when you talk to a founder and we’re early in a month. So last month, if you didn’t quite get to the number of customers that you wanted, or if you didn’t quite get to the amount of revenue that you wanted, two sides of the same coin. If you attribute that to, there was this deal that the last week of the month I thought was going to close and it pushed. They decided not to use us, they went with a competitor. It pushed to this month, whatever it is.
Turner Novak:
Like, if we just could’ve converted that, we would’ve hit our numbers.
Sam Blond:
That’s right.
Turner Novak:
Okay.
Sam Blond:
Or, there were just a couple deals that didn’t convert, and so what we’re really going to do is, we think we know why those deals didn’t convert, so we’re going to start changing stuff based off of that. What you’re effectively doing, whether it’s intentional or not, you’re effectively diagnosing the problem or the bottleneck to acquiring customers and growing revenue as a conversion rate. Like, you didn’t convert that customer.
And back to my diagnosis, we’ll just say nine out of 10 to keep it consistent, nine out of 10 startups, the bottleneck is actually demand. The problem isn’t that you didn’t convert that one customer, the problem is that you didn’t have five customers that you were talking to that last month, and if one of them had converted, you would’ve hit your number, and if two of them had converted, you would have beat your number.
And so I think there’s a disproportionate amount of emphasis placed on conversion rates relative to generating demand. And I think that influencing conversion rates is far more difficult to do than influencing demand gen. And just a thought exercise on this is something like, if you convert 10% of demos that you have, one out of 10 demos you get is going to convert. Moving that to 15%, you might think you’re increasing your conversion rates by 5%. You’re actually increasing your conversion rates by 50%. And especially at scale, that’s a hard thing to do. There’s a lot that goes into it. If you think about, last month we had 10 demos. Going to 20 demos, which is effectively doubling the number of demos that you have in a month, it’s not one size fits all, but I suspect it is far easier to accomplish than that 50% increase in conversion rates.
Turner Novak:
You might need to build a new feature, or you might need to cut the price, change the price. You might need to go after a different target customer.
Sam Blond:
This is on conversion rates.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, on conversion rates.
Sam Blond:
You might need to really learn how to sell. Do discovery quite well and peel back the onion. There’s a lot that goes into it. Or you can just spend some more of your focus and attention on the demand gen side of things, and you don’t even have to improve conversion rates. They can just remain consistent, and if you’re able to double the amount of leads that you’re generating, you’ve just doubled sales effectively.
Turner Novak:
You could, in theory, I don’t think you would agree with this, but you could just pay more for Google Ads and just fill up the email sign-up list and get more demos.
Sam Blond:
Well, here’s something that I wouldn’t disagree with, which is a version of this. If you have a channel that is working for you in demand gen, just double and triple down on that until you get to the point that, this could be you as a founder or your team, until you can’t take more demos. Until you’re at the point where, I now have too many opportunities that I am actively working. Until then, focus and allocate resources towards demand gen until you accomplish what I would describe, and we’re in the fortunate position of having this today, I would define this as a demand-rich environment. And until you have that, really focus on generating demand.
Turner Novak:
And I wanted to ask you this because I think it’s kind of unique. I don’t know of anyone who does this specifically. So there’s this concept of a forward deployed engineer. You guys do the forward deployed sales executive. So what is that at Monaco?
Sam Blond:
FDE is the famous acronym at this point. And we’re FDAE, account executive. I think FDEs more often than not, the application that I’ve seen for true FDEs is a relatively technical product and potentially a large enterprise. So this is the Accentures of the world, and now you have OpenAI and Anthropic that are probably investing in or building their own FDE arms of the businesses.
If you think about Monaco’s customer, which is a startup, Monaco itself, the agents are technical, but it isn’t a highly technical application in the ways that the most technical products are. And these aren’t enterprises, so they don’t need the, historically, BCG, Accenture, that could come in, map everything out and do all this stuff for us. So what our FDAE does is twofold. The first is, they provide a complementary skill set to many of the customers that we have that are in founder-led sales right now.
And so they can leverage this resource as an extension of their team that is helping them with messaging. You and I talked about the multi-channel, and what should the message say. That is somebody that all of our sales reps have a lot of experience doing. A/B testing this stuff. And they’re in the trenches with the founders doing this stuff, alongside, of course, the AI, which is maybe a natural segue. Our FDAEs also have a deep understanding of how Monaco and Monaco agents operate.
And so if you try and deploy an agent, a demand gen agent let’s just say, and you are maybe a founder or a sales leader, you have to manage that agent. It’s work to manage the agent, to set it up, to program it, to make sure that the message, all that stuff. We just do that for you. And so, both the complementary skill set, but also making the platform effective through managing the agents in ways that are definitionally not possible for a founder or a sales leader or a salesperson. They just can’t understand how Monaco works the way that a full-time Monaco employee does. And so through that, it’s far more effective and efficient.
Turner Novak:
So one thing you mentioned is, you guys kind of manage and run the agents for the customers. Does anyone else do that?
Sam Blond:
I’m not aware of anyone else that does that. It doesn’t mean that anyone else is not doing it. It makes a lot of sense. I also do think that there are AI SDRs, and I suspect that if you’re an AI SDR company and you have some really large enterprise customer, you should be providing some FDE-style service to accompany that. That’s super logical.
I do think that in the category that we’re selling into, one of the competitive advantages that we have is our ability to build out a startup go-to-market organization. If you think about most of the players in the space, their backgrounds are more technical or product oriented. That, of course, is an advantage for us in terms of understanding the customer and knowing what to build, understanding the outcomes. But we also have an incredible go-to-market organization, in the same way that one of the best engineering leaders, or a very experienced engineering leader turned founder, could build out a really great engineering organization. And so our go-to-market function, the sales org at Monaco, is a competitive advantage that we really want to lean into, because of the dynamics that I just mentioned.
Turner Novak:
And it’s probably just letting your customers leverage that too. If you think it’s best in class, let your customers tap into it.
Sam Blond:
That is exactly right. You nailed it. And this is one of the things that, interestingly, during the A, the biggest objection was, how does this scale? It was the margins and that sort of thing. And then the FDE thing, unbeknownst to us, we were already calling it an FDAE, it started to really take off. And in the B it was, “We hear this is the big competitive advantage that you have.” So it was a little bit coincidental, in a short amount of time. But yes, we want to lean into this thing that is a pretty big competitive advantage for us today, and I think hard for players in the space right now to either replicate or compete with.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, it almost sounds like the forward deployed employee, the forward deployed specialist, the forward deployed expert is maybe, in 18 months they’ll be talking about it after Monaco makes it a huge thing.
Sam Blond:
Yeah. That would be great.
Turner Novak:
Well, this has been a lot of fun. Thanks for taking the time to do it.
Sam Blond:
Thank you so much for having me. So much fun, and just had a blast.
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