374: The Truth About Validating Your Startup Idea with Mase Issa

Mace, great to see you. Thanks for coming on the show. Yeah. Appreciate it. Glad to be here. I'm excited to have this conversation with you because I, I mean, you and I've had kind of a version of this conversation a few times and I thought, you know what? I've, I've had the opportunity to learn from entrepreneurs and you know, where their first customers have come from. So many times I thought, I want to have this conversation again and just hit record and share it with everybody. Cause I think it's one of the scariest things when you're first starting a company is okay. I've got this idea. Now, and like, maybe we built a thing now what, and then you're sitting at this, like, there's so many different channels, so many different tools, so many different pieces of advice that, you know, VCs and entrepreneurs and your friends are telling you, and

you're like, Oh, I could do literally anything. How do I figure out what to do next? And so I'm excited to hear your story. I would like to start with Fixify. Where did the, where did the thought, where the idea was the Genesis of Fixify? Mase Issa: Yes, it's a good question. You know, We didn't start with the idea first, like the concept of like, what problem do we want to solve in the market? And how are we going to do that? , myself and my two co founders actually met at another company. , and we had all kind of come there somewhat independently. They had worked together before, but it was essentially there. It was taking a services business and basically satisfying it, like for lack of better terms. Right. And so what does that mean is basically how do you take what is typically a one to one, right. Or, , a services based solution and start to introduce that SaaS level scale. So, right. Most people do that by creating a pretty website, making pricing easy, but what about all the underlying pieces of like, there's Set of humans that are involved in helping that company or that solution get to whatever outcome looking for. ,and so that was kind of the thing we ended up either directly or

indirectly or intentionally or unintentionally doing throughout our careers, right? We're mostly services type capabilities. And so we did that in the security space. , we were early employees, not, not founders back at Expel, , is where we did that. And so as we are wrapping up our set, I think a year seven journey, we're kind of looking around, okay, like what's next, right? And we started with, well, what are we good at, right? What's the pattern of capabilities that we bring to bear? And it was this scaling these, what are traditionally services based businesses, right? And it SaaS like both experiences, but also obviously margins, because that's what that's where our VC friends get happy. And so we started looking around and saying, okay, what's, what's close enough to security? Like what, what's a cousin, right? We didn't want to, we were going to move into like financial services or healthcare because we all grew up in a security space and a lot of IT is fundamental for, for that. And so that's kind of where it started. And we, we, I think it was one of my co founders was like, well, what about the IT space? Right. Like, I haven't seen a lot of people running into there. Right. Not a lot of new companies popping up. Is there an opportunity there or are there just a bunch

of dead bodies in a dark room and we didn't know what's going to happen. So that was like the first moment of like, okay, we've got a thing. Maybe let's go play around with it for a little bit. Collin Stewart: I imagine every founder's thought about this of like, what am I going to do next? And I have like a part of me has this like, just crave to do something new and like go into a new space, you know, like I've been in sales and sales tech for a while. I'm like, what if I, you know, a side project I did in the, when the pandemic hit was a B2C fitness app. And like, obviously not my skill set, but I really enjoyed that. How do you feel about going into something that was so close to what you were doing before? Mase Issa: I mean, if I, I mean, look, I think there's a bit of imposter syndrome in everybody. Right. So there's always a little bit of like, should I do this? Can I do this? Right. As, as you're starting off on a new endeavor. And so I think that gave me a bit of comfort because it's like, look, there's parts of this problem or it's parts of the problem or the solution set. That you understand that you've kind of

earned for me. It's earning SDRipes, right? That's where all these gray hairs come from. And so you kind of, you want to bring that along with you. I, you know, I wouldn't feel super comfortable if I'm going into a whole new induSDRy with a whole new business model with a customer problem. I don't even understand because I think. I would have to learn a lot and some would have, would have to pay for that learning, right? That comes at a cost. And so how do I really take what we already know? And for me, you know, I'm blessed and I have two amazing co founders, right? We each bring different skill sets. So we kind of de-risk that a little bit. But for me, it's like, there's got to be, for me to be comfortable, there's got to be something I can translate over with me, right? In doing so. Collin Stewart: Fair enough. So you kind of had the space settled. Be well. Bye. All right, let's, let's kind of look at the, the IT space. Was it, the co founder idea where you guys brainstorming? Were you talking to customers? Like, how did you go from, okay, let's go in this direction to fixify? Mase Issa: Yeah. So the first thing we said is okay, it's IT space. Now what problems exist? In the space, like what are we seeing? And then again, how does that match to what, what we bring to the table? And so my immediate reaction is like, we scale services, right? So what it services are

provided and help desk was like. Kind of a very standout, standout ish thing. So think like go to every market research report. You can find any of those key players and start downloading reports, reading those and just getting and doing a much research about like, what would a hypothesis statement look like? Right. What's a concept. That we could put together and start validating. And what we came up with was we think there's an opportunity to go into the help desk space and help organizations scale their help desk, but maintain a level of care, right. As you were doing so. And so like, cool, that's the hypothesis, put that on the wall. And now the mom test book shows up, right? It's like, okay, look, this is a book that's been widely used, widely celebrated, let's start looking at how do we take that concept, that hypothesis and start researching it and understanding it and talking to people. And so We were lucky in that we had relationships. We had a very good relationship with some venture capitalists that we had worked with in the past. And so they were kind of ready to be like, okay, cool. If you've got a concept, you know, we're willing to be on the journey with you, which was, which was pretty awesome. And that really let us leave

our current jobs and really validate hypothesis full time. And so that's kind of what we did. We ended up doing that and then basically. The best advice I ever got is start selling day one. So the company started September 1st of 2023. We had our first call on September 1st of 2023. Right. And so we were talking to customers about the concept and what we're trying to build. And now I'm probably on conversation number 450, right? Here we are now in, in January of 2025. And it's a thing that we're not stopping. Like it's the best way to get feedback is to talk to as many prospects or people that are in this space as possible. Collin Stewart: 400 conversations. And it's still you leading the charge. Mase Issa: Yeah. Well, so we've, we've we've upgraded big time. I, I joke, but I'm not a professional go to market expert. So in September we brought in a sales leader to help join me in the fight. However, I'm still involved, right? I think it's important part of, of, of the company because part of Our sales leaders really figuring out the go to market experimentation I'm figuring out the product and operations experimentation. Right. Which is like, what's the feedback we need to take to the product team and the delivery team to adjust and

learn as we're going through this. Right. And so that was like thing. Number one thing, number two is we saw enough demand and pipeline. So we looked at our, our pipeline, the customers that we were closing and kind of looked at and said, okay, we see a path to like that first million, right, first half a million in ARR where we feel comfortable bringing in some, some help for me on the go to market side. Love it. Collin Stewart: If we can go right back to those, I love that you started selling at day one. And when I, when you say selling, I don't think you were saying, Hey, you're trying to close deals on day one. You were asking customers, you were getting out of the building. What did that process look like? How many of those conversations did you have before you actually started building something? Mase Issa: Yeah. So we decided what we were going to do was start with a basic framework of what we're going to build that was basically an architecture diagram with a, what would a customer experience on end of that? That was, I still literally have it. That was a good old age story of a piece of paper with, with a pencil. Because we had to start with something, right. And our market research kind of guided us to that, right. In terms of like what that was. And then, so then it was like, cool, now I got to go talk to some people and validate it.

And so we basically, at the beginning, we're like, we're going to talk to 10 people. And then we're going to just stop and recess, like 10 conversations. And then what happens? And we kind of did that three times, right? And right about the 30 mark, we're like, okay, we've, we've adjusted this down to a narrow enough focus where we can continue to learn and experiment. And so that was kind of the first thing, set a goal, set an accountability point, and just go talk to 10 people that you believe would benefit in the thing you're building that have the problem you think they have. That started to really focus me because I'm like, I have to go have 10 conversations. I will go anywhere and talk to anybody that I can. That fits the mold of the people I'm trying to talk to. Collin Stewart: Love it. Where did those first 10 folks come from? Like, were you working in your network? Were you cold outbounding? Were you, you know? Mase Issa: This is my favorite. It's never well for me, in my experience, like everyone thinks there's just one thing that's going to get it done. No. I learned about how to talk. Or how to get access to people from all kinds of places. I was

listening to podcasts. I was actually on your newsletter, right? I was going anywhere to open up as they say, my RAS to figure out like, where can I talk to folks? So obviously the VC networks, right? All the VCs have some level of access to talking to people. I think the thing that was most important across all the sources. So VC networks, there's a platform called User Interviews. There's a platform called Office Hours. There's the platform called SageTap that we ended up using a little bit later. There's our own LinkedIn networks, right? The thing that we did that was most beneficial across all that is we said, who are we going after? What's the title, right? What's the persona that we're going after? What's the firmographics of the company they work at? What's the size? What's the induSDRy? What's the footprint? I don't need to be right, right? I had an old coworker that says, don't get it. Right. Get it written. So we wrote it down and we started working off of that. Then that allowed me to focus on like, I need to go find 10 people like this, but that's like every founder's dream. Like that, you know, I think at the end of the day, that's why we're here because we're really good at what you put me to a problem. I can devour the problem, but I

need the problem pointed at first. Right. So that was kind of just no secret, there's no secret sauce. You just gotta pick a goal and then just try to find a way to get in front of as many of the people that fit within your profile as you can. Collin Stewart: I love that. So it seems like it was, it wasn't just one channel. It was every channel. It was VCs. It was your network. It was asking people for referrals. It was using the user interviews, office hours, SageTap. Is that the last one I heard? Mase Issa: Yeah. SageTap. Yeah. SageTap is a bit of like, it's like a speed dating for vendor vendors and buyers. It's kind of, it's kind of interesting. Yeah. It's pretty neat. Collin Stewart: I'll find the links and throw them in the show notes if anybody's anybody's curious. And so you talk to ten people, you repeated that three times as you refined your hypothesis. At what point did you start building? Or did, you know, the tech people start building? Mase Issa: Yeah, so I mean, again, we were building day one because what we said to ourselves is if we were going to solve a helpdesk problem, what are the things that are going to have to be there no matter what? Like,

they're non negotiable. As you think about, I'm a helpdesk leader, I'm going to trust Fixify to take on my helpdesk. Well. One, I need to be able to talk to your end users. So I need a communication channel, right? Is that intervening with Slack? Is that, you know, we're building our own chatbot. Like, what are we doing? We need to have a data set. We need to be able to store data. We need that in a secure way. So a lot of the architecture was starting to get built. Those are bets, right? Some of them we got right. Some of them we got wrong. The point was we had to be moving in some direction, right? We couldn't just be waiting. For the market feedback to come back with, we have to make some bets Collin Stewart: out of curiosity. What, what percentage of those bets do you think paid off and what percentage were throw away? Mase Issa: Ooh, okay. It was so funny. I'll give you both the business bets and then also the, I call it the technical bet. So if I relook at our pitch deck. I think it's like 11 slides, so keep it nice and tight. I think three of them were completely wrong, like completely off what we were doing. But the general notion was like, we're going West, right? We're heading that way. So we were still going in the right direction. None of them were wrong enough

to like, obviously deSDRoy, deSDRoy the company. But I think that's common. Again, you're, I've only ever been right about 70 percent of the time in anything. Some people will probably argue, I've only been right 30 percent of the time in anything. So you kind of want to make those bets things like who our target customers, what are the problems that they have? Right. Great. What are the solutions that exist in the market? Why are they not choosing to use those? Right? Those are, those are things you think, you know, you don't know until you talk to people. Right. So that, that was on the business side on the technical side, right? You know, there was the time Fixify was born. ChatGPT was blown up. LLMs were a big thing. So we're keeping a close eye on, you know, is this technology that's showing up really going to absorb the entire help desk solution, right? Like, is it all just going to be chatbots and robots, right? Guess what? I was like, yeah, it probably is. Like just probably a big part of this. That's going to be AI and LM driven. You start talking to it leaders and they're like, my users don't want to talk to a chatbot. Collin Stewart: God, no. They don't want that. I'm the guy who like I, I dialed in and I get the automated phone and I immediately I'm like, let's just see if it works.

Zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero. And then sometimes, you know, it works. And sometimes I got to call back because it. It froze the phone system or it just hangs up on you or whatever. Mase Issa: Yeah, I'm go ahead. No, I know what I was gonna say. And so, again, as you look at the thing, you, you got to try to have to get right, because otherwise it causes you time and time is very expensive is the core 1 way door decisions, right? It's, it's that. I think it's a Netflix term or Amazon term. It's like Amazon is Amazon. Yeah. One way doors and two way doors, right? You've got to really pause and say, are we making a one way door decision where you can't walk back through it? Or is it a two, two way door decision where if we need to walk through it or walk back, it's going to be okay. And that's where you need to slow down and be like, hold on. Even architecturally, like what kind of decisions are we making? Are we hosting this thing in AWS? Great. That's going to help us move much faster with our developers. And so those are some of the decisions that I think are important that you just, I would pause on and be like, hold on, let me, let me sanity check those. Collin Stewart: Can you tell me about a a bad bet that didn't work out either technically or on

the business side? Mase Issa: Oh yeah. So we originally thought the company was going to be focused on organizations like small, like 50, you know, 60, 70 employees, maybe like 100, 150. What we realized is most of those organizations have an IT person. And they're crushing it, right? They're building automation. They're building tools and the business itself. Their, their complexity hasn't evolved enough to, to need help, right? What does that mean? What are the, the components of a company that become complex? One is the technology stack, right? So we use a joke, which is how many tiles do you have in your single sign on tool? Right? So you have to scroll. You've now outgrown the one IT person or the local managed service provider, right? So that's number one. Number two is, has IT become the infraSDRucture backbone for the company, right? Does legal rely on IT to track things, right? Are there workflows related to legal things and contract review? When new hires start, you know, is your employee experience team now saying, Hey, we need to define a process here. We need repeatability. Is security

showing up and saying, Hey, we need to have, we got audits now, right? We got to make sure we're tracking everything. And so when it is no longer about just supporting end users and it's SDRategic to the company, and it's now supporting the whole company, that's when we were like, okay, then it becomes serious enough where an investment makes sense. Right. And as a startup, you want to find the buying moment. You want to find the moment that they, that the need is the most. So you can come in and obviously take advantage of that. And so we started to realize there's a size element there that we completely missed on when we first kind of pitching the company. And so we adjusted, right? We redirected, okay, we got to be a little bit bigger. And that was, that was a lesson learned and quickly changed. Start targeting those customers or prospects. Collin Stewart: So three rounds of 10, you started selling and building on day one. How long did it take you to land that first customer? Mase Issa: Ooh, good question. So we started the company in September. In fact, this is a bit of a, another thing that I screwed up, but which we can have a whole episode on that. It was February, so like six, seven months into the company. And we had the kind of our first person that was like, Hey, I'm, I'm super interested.

I'm in kind of give you the verbal. And so I had this really beautiful, like waterfall style plan, right? It was February, March. I was going to do like a light POC, April, we were going to do an assessment on how that went. I was going to then do pricing in May, contracting in June. And by July, we'd have our first customer, even before our first year of the company being born. That person looked at me dead. And I'd be like, why can't we just turn this on tomorrow? And I was like, I mean, you're kind of, I mean, yeah, that's, I mean, I could figure all that. I mean, you could, I mean, you could figure out pricing real quick because what ended up happening is he asked me that question. I went back to the founders and rest of the team and I'm like, well, we have to build a pricing model, but we're probably going to redo the pricing anyway. So why does it, why do I have to spend a month on a price? Like, no. Right. And so. We started to really understand like how much process and over exaggeration was I inserting in the whole thing versus like, let's go and see what works. And we're now a 15, well, we haven't hit our

two year mark yet. So 15, 16 months in, still using the same pricing model. There you go. haven't had to change it. Right. Still using the original MSA. Haven't had to change it. Slight changes here and there, but it goes to show you, like sometimes you create These big bespoke steps and put them in your, in your way. When in reality, customers like it, get that out of here. Like, let's go. Right. Collin Stewart: I remember having a, we had a, we got it as early days. My first company, we had some grant to help us hire a designer and the company was voltage CRM, and it was like a, it was an analogy on like the voltage and a voltage is basically pressure, electrical pressure in a pipeline or on a line. And so that was the idea is like apply voltage to your pipeline is CRM. And we had a designer spend like a whole week, if not two weeks designing this really complicated, like engine diagram for the website. And I remember finishing it. I'm like, man, this is awesome. And I love it. But like, we just wasted so much of our

cycles doing something that means nothing. And it looks great, but like I put way too much time into this thing that means absolutely nothing. Mase Issa: And that's, that's the, some of the lessons you learned, like where, where does it make sense to spend time? Where are you unnecessarily solving for risks that don't exist at, or like, I'd love to have problems where my, I have enough demand where my pricing model needs to be adjusted. Right. Like I'd love to have that problem. Right. And so something we pay attention to as well as are we signing ourselves up for future problems that we don't need to be solving yet. At the same time, making sure we're laying good foundations in. Right. So we don't have problems that are unsolvable right later down the line. So Collin Stewart: tell me about that first customer. Did they, where did they come from? Were they part of the research process or somewhere else? Mase Issa: Yeah, they ended up coming through the friends and family network. Didn't know the person didn't know the buyer. We knew someone at the company and we, you know, obviously, Hey, we're starting a company with, you know, Would love to talk to you about it. Do you have, who in your company runs this department? They're like, Oh, it's this person over here. So that helped a

little bit. In what I call like the transfer of trust, right? So I would argue that a lot of our early customers started from a position of trust. And so what that allows us to do. Is almost skip the first two steps in pitching a prospect, right? Which is outside of just understanding the problem is building that trust. Can this company do what I'm asking you to start up? And so that really was helpful to us because then we were able to get like, okay, is this solution the right solution? Right. And can we actually close a customer? Like, do we actually have the skills to close an actual customer? And so now as we're looking at the broader go to market engine, like, great. What gymnastics that person do for us, because they trusted us that we're not going to get from a cold call, right? That we're not going to get from an outbound SDR call. Right? And so now we're going back and saying, we do have to think about those things. Collin Stewart: Yeah. I remember somebody asked you being on a sales call, like case asked for a case study. And it was one of those, like, head slapping moments where I'm like, no, I don't have it. I'm like,

I've got tons of happy customers, but I haven't gone and done the work. And as soon as we had those case studies to share with people, you know, after the first call, like our closed rates went way up. It is one of those obvious things that I'm like, of course we should have had, but we didn't. So first customer took seven months, came from the friends and family network. There's a handful of customers, maybe a couple of handfuls of customers that have closed since. Where did the, what was the, the general source lead source on those ones, friends, family, hustle? Mase Issa: Yeah, it's, it's, it's kind of nuts because we've, we've, we have graphs now. We're we're, we're growing up and it's interesting because you have, we have a graph that's like, where did it come from and it's a bar chart and it's or stack bar chart. It's all different colors. Right. So it's not all the same, right? We've got some that came from those expert platforms like office hours. We have some that came from our VC introductions. We have some that came from our friends and family. And so that's why at the beginning I was like, look, you've got to set a goal and you've got to go where you got to go to get the customers. Cause you're not looking for the, you're not trying to find the platform. Or,

yeah, you're not trying to find the platform necessarily. And I would argue, yes, you're trying to find the customer, but you're actually trying to find the right customer. I would consider all these very early adopters folks. Cause they're like, why would I, why would I trust you to do my help desk? Right. So by nature, that persona is a little bit different. And so you have to kind of pick up on that as well and do some sorting early on and make sure like you're going after that. So how do you know someone is an early adopter? Well, go on their LinkedIn, see who they follow, see what companies they follow. There are some tools you could buy to figure out what tech they're using, right? And so they've got three or four pieces of technology or vendors in there. You can Google when those companies were established, right? You can start to figure those things out. They're probably posting a lot, right? They're probably doing a lot of things in modern technology like AI. So there's things you can do to figure that out. They're probably connected to VCs, right? In their LinkedIn. So there are things you can do to assess that. Because what you're trying to figure out is, how do I find the right people to build this with me? Not how do I just find people, right? Collin Stewart: And that's such a good point because the, you know, you go back to the technology adoption life cycle. You know, the folks that are the innovators that are the early

adopters is a dramatically different persona than the early majority of the late majority. And the early majority is going to be the bulk of folks, but it's those crazy few that are going to help take a chance on something like fixify being their first customer. Like I remember my first customer ever, Bob, he had, he was out of his mind to pick us at, to be their CRM company, but they were super, the whole company was super happy. Okay. And when we tried to go and replicate it, we found like Bob was just such a niche of one. And so what was how did you filter down for that? Like, in your process, what did that look like for you? Was it just naturally you were getting all these early adopters or were there some late majority folks that just weren't? You know, weren't willing to move forward or weren't willing to have conversations. Mase Issa: Yeah, outside of obviously trying to make sure you bring in the right people into your pipeline, right? Making sure you're, you're going after the right folks, even look through profiles. I remember for hours looking through some of these expert databases, right? They basically connect to LinkedIn, right? And they help you,

help you get access to folks. And I would pass over folks that. I felt that didn't fit just for where we are as a company. Right. So that's, that's the first piece is making sure that people, the second piece is once you get on a call with them, if they're describing your product back to you and they're giving you feature add ons versus challenging you on your decisions, you're like, yes. Right. Cause what they're saying is I've been trying to build the thing you're building. I already built the thing you're building. Collin Stewart: Yeah. I built it in Excel or I built it in by cobbling these, I got duct tape and you know, cardboard holding it together. Mase Issa: Yes. And so that's usually when you get those lean in moments, you're like, okay, cool. I don't have to pull this person. They're pulling, they're pulling me. They're like, come on, let's go. Right. And it doesn't mean that the other folks you're talking to aren't a good fit. You just might, we need to fix it. I might not be ready for that. Right. Cause it's the use cases, the customer referrals. Right. All of those things that we might not be ready for. Collin Stewart: Last question for you. I want you to describe what it felt like when you finally felt like you had product market fit.