377: The Product-Market Fit Journey with Zach Barney

fourth time on the predictable revenue podcast that I come from the sales world. I've been building and leading sales teams for a very long time and doing that, from the early stage startups phase all the way through post IPO and I worked at a private equity firm for three years before starting Mobly. Being in a sales leadership role, you don't really move up and see much success unless you know your numbers and metrics and are data driven. And it's really hard to do that with events. It's not impossible, but it's really hard manual, cumbersome and expensive. So I would find in. Throughout my career, going to conferences and trade shows, it'd be like pulling teeth, getting proper lead attribution and understanding what was driving revenue, what was fluff and how to really turn that into a predictable machine. Collin Stewart: Gotcha. So you've been to a bunch of conferences and then, like, when you were deciding to start a

company, there's so many different things you can, you could go off of. Obviously you had the experience, you could have gone sales development, you could have gone closing. What was it about conferences that pulled you in? Zach Barney: That was where I was feeling the most pain. So there are a lot of tools out there that have solved a lot of problems. Like on the digital marketing side, you've got HubSpot and my goodness, Marketo, Pardot, there's a billion tools out there that help with marketing automation for sales development and outbounding. You've got your engagement platforms like Outreach, SalesLoft, now Gong Engage and ClaryBot, Groove, like a ton of stuff. There wasn't anything helping with the event side of things. So I would go to an event and send my team to an event and we'd feel really good about that event because we'd have face to face conversations with our ICP and feel good. Collin Stewart: And then bad scans, maybe. Zach Barney: Yeah. But then like two weeks later, we get the list

back from all of our scans, back from the event and you get weeks later, right? The average is I think 11 days now for the industry and we'd get. Collins burner account 19 at hotmail. com or, somebody registers five people from their company with the same contact information. So like you'd have to go through this whole other process to clean up and enrich the data, map the fields, get it pushed to your CRM. It's just, it's time consuming and people don't have that long of an attention span. They don't have that. They just don't have that much interest when they have other things going on. So if somebody is raising their hand, wanting to talk to you, allows you to scan their badge and wants to schedule follow up conversations, why not make that easier and faster? So I, yeah, I set about trying to solve that problem and here we are today. Collin Stewart: Cool. So how did you go about validating it? Cause it's one thing to have this insight and I would agree with you. I won't say names, the app names that that we've all used and they're awful, 11 days. It's

terrible. We've been to, we were one of the first sponsors of Sastr. We went six or seven years in a row and like, nothing against Sastr, but the apps that they were using, the badge scans, it was just worthless. We, we resorted to printing out postcards and we wrote our qualification questions on postcards and then we would just tick them off and then flip it over on the back and take notes there. And then Zach Barney: we had to be clear. This wasn't in the 1980s, right? Collin, this was eight, nine years ago. I am that old. Collin Stewart: No, this was like five years ago. Like five, six, seven, I think we started doing it maybe seven or eight years ago, but we would just print them off and we had the manila envelope or manila folders. And we, this one, we booked a meeting, this one, we need to follow up this one. And like, it felt janky, but it was way better than any batch scan. Yeah, exactly. Because you actually do something with them. Yep. And obviously there's an opportunity there. Huh? Cool. I love it. So how did you go about validating it? What did that process look like? Zach Barney: Yeah,

we talked to a lot of people. In fact, you were one of those people I remember chatting with you years ago when Chris, my co founder and I decided that we wanted to start working on this. That's the first thing we needed to do was. Talk to people and make sure it wasn't a Zach problem. So we chatted with 30, 40 people that were all CEOs or heads of marketing or directors of events, like all people that we should be selling to various sizes and got. Overwhelmingly positive responses. The vast majority of people said, yeah, this is a problem. I would love to see it solved. So that's when we decided to spend a little bit of money and time building out a prototype in Figma, still dipping our toe in the water. And then we took said prototype back to all the people that said, yeah, please build something. So we went and had 30 more additional deep interviews, showing them the prototype over the course of about a month in December of 2022. And the feedback again, was

overwhelmingly positive. People were asking us for contracts and we're like this is just a Figma prototype. We don't have it yet, but thank you. Collin Stewart: That's amazing. Zach Barney: At the same time. Like, I was just continuing to experience the pain myself going to events and having it take forever. Like, I cannot believe this hasn't been solved yet. I've had the idea for a long time and yeah, that's how it went. Collin Stewart: Cool. And so who did you reach out to first? I guess obviously you're pretty connected in the sales world, so finding sales leaders that go to conferences pretty regularly are probably, 30 of your best friends that you're reaching out to. Is that fair? Zach Barney: A lot of that, a lot of marketers, a lot of former coworkers of mine that went on to start their own thing and gone through the founder journey and knew what I was getting myself into. Yeah. Collin Stewart: Roughly, how many conversations? I heard 30 kind of prototype feedback sessions. How many? Zach Barney: I was probably 40 on the initial and 30 or so said, yeah, this is super interesting. We want to learn more.

Yeah. Collin Stewart: And. You were in the source of those 40 that was like front leg referrals word of mouth kind of thing. Yeah, mostly I mean we also just reached out to people that we thought would be a good fit and said hey We're thinking about building this thing. Zach Barney: Would you mind giving us some product feedback? That's a minority though The bulk of them are people that we knew Collin Stewart: Yeah, fair enough. It's always way more handy when you could sell or you could get that feedback from the folks within your network. Yeah. So the validation process, 40 initial interviews, 30 feedback sessions. Where did the first customer come from? Zach Barney: First customer came from a former customer of mine at a previous startup from. 1314 years ago, who was 1 of the initial people that we interviewed saw the value. He had recently gone off on his own and And saw the need because he was building out relationships that at events. So he said he was absolutely willing to put a little bit of

money toward it and ask for a contract, signed it and paid by credit card same day. So that was great. And then our first enterprise account came from an event where. We ate our own dog food and showed them how it worked while they were struggling with the whole fishbowl full of business cards. Collin Stewart: Oh, that's awesome. I will race you. And what a great opportunity to go and like show off the product. And because you're actually using it, you're not just rubbing it in their face. Zach Barney: We're very lucky. Being a marketing tech company selling to marketers have budgets and understand pain going to places where marketers hang out. It's just, it's really nice and inconvenient for us. Collin Stewart: So first customer came from customer development interviews. And you're, where did your next customers come from? Zach Barney: LinkedIn, Chris and I are both incredibly loud and well networked on LinkedIn. We post and build in public and drive a lot of demand there. We paid a little bit of money to get our own website and got a bunch of

random inbound leads. But That's all anecdotal, Collin. The biggest one was going to events and meeting people like we w we would go to an event where people would be experiencing the pain that we solved and we would just talk talk, visit everybody, get a better understanding of them and their situation and pain. And yeah that's where the lion's share of our early customers came from. Collin Stewart: Cool. How many conferences do you, did you do or to get those first? Zach Barney: Oh, man. I want to say me personally, at least 15 to 20 over the course of about six, eight months. Collin Stewart: That's quite a few conferences. Zach Barney: Yeah. Like almost every week we were at something, whether it's a small local thing or traveling. Collin Stewart: Gotcha. Easy with a big family, I'm sure. Zach Barney: So easy when you're married with five kids, Chris has six. Collin Stewart: Oh my God. So you guys live in Utah or something? Zach Barney: Yeah. Those weirdos. Wow. Collin Stewart: That's a big family. That's awesome.

So. First early set of customers came from conferences. You mentioned building in public and posting a bunch on LinkedIn. What did that produce a value? I see a ton of people talking about the building in public and posting on socials and Reddit and LinkedIn. And it's a whole lot of effort. And maybe if the algorithm catches you great, maybe if you already have those people in your network that are already following you, maybe that works. I'm curious, what kind of value do you attribute to that? Zach Barney: I would say the biggest value is it's. I don't think it's that much effort, like just to spend five, 10 minutes posting something, whatever's on your head, sharing real raw updates, make yourself real and accessible and, live as a human being that resonates with a lot of people and you never know who is going to have a need for what you're solving. So being out there and staying top of mind is. Never a bad idea as long as you're, not getting overly political or controversial in your post. Like you

can't harm your business by being out there and being authentic. So that's what we just decided to do. We're going to be ourselves. We're not going to be overly formulaic. We're just going to post frequently and network with people and engage with people and it works. Yeah. Collin Stewart: Right on. It works, I think, part in part because you're you're selling to marketers and they happen to be on. LinkedIn. Zach Barney: Yeah. I want to be on LinkedIn all day like the PE firm that I was at. We sold to auto shops. Shop owners don't hang out on LinkedIn. You know where they do hang out? They hang out in Facebook groups. Huh. I didn't know that was still a thing, but they do. So that's what they were big on, on the sales side. Collin Stewart: Really? Interesting. Yep. Facebook groups. You learn something new every day. Zach Barney: Crazy. Blew my mind. Collin Stewart: So I want you to think back to like that moment where you first realized you had product market fit. What did it feel like? Zach Barney: It wasn't that long ago and it was fricking awesome. So

when we first raised a pre seed round about a year ago our lead investor was very careful to tell us you don't have product market fit yet. Like you've got early signs, but this is what he calls concept market fit where people, they buy the idea. They understand that there is a pain and they're willing to invest a little bit in it. But you've got product market fit when people renew and when they upsell and when they refer people to you. So we got through our first revenue cycle. Our first renewals happened probably four or five months ago. And the rate at which people renewed and upsold and signed multi year agreements was our evidence to say, yep, we got it. We got it. Like people are buying, they're happy with it. They're happy enough to take it with them when they leave the company and go somewhere new. We had two of those today. And and that, yeah, when they're willing to pay you more money, And do case studies for you and sign upsell agreements. Then clear as day, we have product market. Collin Stewart: Yeah. That's fantastic. Was there something in the

early, like, what were the earliest signs of, like, I think there might be something interesting here? Zach Barney: One of our very first customers she used to work at a predecessor of Mobly, like a company that was building something similar, didn't attack the problem the same way, but was attacking the same problem. And to hear her say, This is what we should have done back then. And I have been looking for something like this, like super early on. That was like, yep, we got something. This is an industry veteran who is far more about it than I do. Who's telling us we're onto something really impactful and was willing to sign an agreement with us really quickly without any sort of social proof or anything was was definitely a leading indicator that we would get there. Collin Stewart: That's pretty exciting. Those are always really fun moments. Zach Barney: So fun. Yeah. Collin Stewart: Were you intentionally going out to industry vets and saying, Hey let's find the old dogs in the space and see if they can tell us this is a terrible idea. Zach Barney: Yeah, absolutely.

I love that. As you started to scale up, it sounds like events is obviously a big part. Where, what channels are bringing in the most customers right now? Zach Barney: Events, webinars, podcasts, and we just started experience experimenting a little bit with like content syndication and ads. And so it's a little early to tell on those ones, but we get leads all the time from our webinars and podcasts as well as events. Collin Stewart: Cool. Talk to me about the webinars. Zach Barney: So we try to do at least a couple a month where we're teaching, not selling, so we'll pull on Mobly power users or just industry vets, maybe integration partners and talk about best practices on how to increase your lead conversion rate or speed to lead or something else around your event. Strategy and lean on them have mostly be the place where all of that knowledge sits in place. So we do a lot of that

and yeah, we don't get a ton of attendees, but we're consistent with it. 50, 60 attendees every time we do a webinar and we get leads from it. And then our sales team follows up with the leads from it. And we sell those right. Collin Stewart: Are those partner webinars or like, where are the attendees coming from? Zach Barney: We've got our own list. The partner is marketed. We market it on social, but yeah it's mostly us just sending out email blasts to our subscriber base and connections and telling them to invite people. Collin Stewart: Gotcha. I love it. I really appreciate you coming on. I wanted to, before we go, you have an interesting story. Tell me about what happened to your knee. Zach Barney: Yeah, we're recording this a little bit late today because I was just finishing up a CT scan and the hospital was running late. 16 years ago, I tore my knee apart playing basketball in college. I was not a collegiate basketball player. I was playing intramural basketball, nothing special. Had an overly competitive guy guarding me who got mad that we were Beating them and started playing cheap,

undercut me, tore everything there is to tear on my knee. So I had that all repaired and had a really hard time jumping or cutting back and forth anymore. So I got into distance running because I could run slow in a straight line. Unfortunately, when you have a repaired knee, all that scar tissue starts wearing down the cartilage, the more pavement pounding you do. I'm at full bone on bone arthritis. And for the past probably two, three years, we've been trying to prevent it or not prevent, but prolong the life of my knee by doing gel injections, cortisone shots. Nerve ablations, you name it. Unfortunately, here's the best part of the story. Collin Christmas Eve. I am walking upstairs with a box of Christmas presents to place under the tree and I stubbed my toe barely. Like, like, like not even enough to say ouch, but I ended up tearing my MCL, So I went to the doctor, he's like, it's not even worth trying to repair anymore. Like, let's just

rip it out and it's gone. The new one in it's time to do it. And he's been, he's a really good surgeon that, it's a good surgeon when they're trying to tell you not to get surgery and he's been trying to prevent it for a long time. And even he was finally like, yeah, we got to do this, man. So 40th birthday present to myself is a plastic knee. Collin Stewart: Hey, there you go. Happy early birthday. Zach Barney: Thanks, man. I appreciate it. Collin Stewart: Maybe a follow up present we can send you as some customers. Tell me a little bit about Mobly. If people haven't figured it out, what does it do? How can they find out more? Yeah. Zach Barney: Mobly is the system of record for event marketing. Think about all of the work that has to be done with. Creating your events, your campaigns, assigning users, creating custom qualification tags, and then actually capturing leads. You can use Mobly to do all of that, so you never have to rent a clunky badge scanner again and download spreadsheets and deal with that. It's one app that you can use for everything with the management on the backend so that you can have clear attribution. Get Mobly.com is our