In this post I’ll explain:

1. What the Weekly Update is & what it entails
2. Who is on our Weekly Mailing List and how we grow it
3. How it was exceptionally useful for us this past week
4. Three example updates (#6, #13, #18)

What is a Weekly Update & what does it entail?

A weekly update is an opportunity for our company to share our progress on the business and what we need help with.

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Why do a Weekly Update?

‍A few reasons:

• It holds ourselves accountable for reporting (super critical!)
• Unlocks an informal network of people who can help us on our journey. It also keeps folks passively engaged with our company so if we need to reach out for whatever reason, they have context on who we are and what we do
• It’s a time to reflect and realize what we’re learning (also so fun to look at the evolution of our journey!)
• It’s a resource for new hires/interns to get ramped up on the company and for current employees/interns to keep in the loop about the company as whole

When did we start the Weekly Update?

Too late! We started on Jan 22nd, 2020 but I wish we had started earlier. The moment we talked to anyone about the idea we should have been adding them to a mailing list. I didn’t want to start it earlier because I was embarrassed about the progress of the company - we didn’t know what we were going to build, we didn’t have it all figured out, the “numbers” weren’t up and to the right as fast I wanted... so I waited. If you’re thinking about starting a Weekly Update - do not be embarrassed! You will pivot, your numbers will be bad sometimes. But that is OK. Your supporters on your update are just excited to be along for the ride.

All the credit goes to Techstars who required us to start sending our updates. If it wasn’t for them making us do this we never would have! We’re so grateful they helped instill this behavior in us. Here’s our first one ever:

Moving from weekly -> biweekly: Now that our company is a bit further along we recently switched from weekly to biweekly. But the weekly format was fantastic for the first ~6 months.‍

So what goes into a mailing list? Ours contains at least:

1. Catchy subject line (always include emojis!)
2. Reminder on what Warmly does (people get a lot of emails and need reminders!)
3. Asks (we make these super actionable and easy to do)
4. TL;DR
5. KPIs (3 maximum, add a graph of the primary one)
6. Accomplishments/Wins
7. Failures/Learnings
8. Gratitudes (never forget to be thankful to those who help you! Many of them will be on the weekly mailing list)

But sometimes we add in other sections depending on what is important. For example right now we include a section to link to our weekly YC blogposts!

Who is on our Weekly Mailing List and how we grow it

Our list has many constituents:

• Investors
• Prospective investors
• Friends
• Family
• Customers
• Advisors / Mentors
• People who were generous with their time to us
• Fellow founders

Each of these flavors of humans add helpful spice to our company. Some respond often, some extremely rarely. And some unsubscribe, but that’s okay too :)

One question we get a lot is “aren’t you worried about being so transparent to so many people about the inner workings of your company?” And the answer is yes, at first we were worried. But then we realized that for an early stage company to succeed we had to be vulnerable about our problems and our accomplishments and our learnings so that we could get all the help we could get! We still need so much help and the mailing list is essential towards getting that help.

We grow our mailing list by just asking. All the time. If we think the person could help us on our journey or has offered to help us in the future we add them to the mailing list. Low cost way of allowing them to help us if they want.

What does YC recommend? We actually disagree with the YC recommendation. They say that you should email just your investors / closest mentors with an update. We have seen that it’s surprising who actually is helpful and so by expanding the list dramatically we have a larger base of knowledge to draw on.

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How it was exceptionally useful for us this past week

Here was the beginning of this week’s update:

As always we keep the Asks near the top. We’re eager to get customer development interviews for a new product direction and need to start finding mid market design partners ASAP as we move upmarket. These two top priorities are mission critical and with so much going on in Y-Combinator we were struggling to find the bandwidth to make time for these. Within 24 hours we had 10 responses offering to help:

Supporters of Warmly!

Think about how much more difficult it would be to wait until we had an ask and then have to go out and find people one at a time willing to stop those asks. Instead we have 376 people able to jump in if they can help!

Three example updates (#6, #11, #17)

Example #1: Update 6:

Subject: [Update #6] 🏦🤜🤛 Warmly: a focus on enterprise customer communities

Hey {{First | fallback: Warmly Friend}},

🤔What do we do again? For B2B SAAS customer success managers who want to reduce churn, Warmly’s customer community platform builds engagement and retention through peer-to-peer customer interaction.

💡Our first ask: Could you please introduce [email protected] to 1 customer success VP or manager in your network for a 20 min customer interview to understand how they think about their customer community?

>Want easy-mode? Just email me a 👍 and we’ll find someone for you in your LinkedIn network to intro to us with a fwd’able blurb.

>Have someone in mind? Here’s a fwd’able blurb if helpful.

TL;DR: Did customer research with 23 customer success managers, customer support & sales managers and starting gaining conviction on our top clear enterprise pain point (from 5) that we plan to investigate further. Halted feature development to focus on building conviction.

🎉 Accomplishments/Wins:

> Interviewed 23 people: customer success managers, customer support & sales managers enterprise pain points building the most conviction on customer success networks

> Wrote 5 Lean Canvas business plans* for our top enterprise pain points. These were backed by confirmed customer data and held to strong decision making by killing off the 3 least viable & personally unexciting businesses.

> We killed PushPull for consumer communities. Killing what is kind-of working is sometimes incredibly hard but the right thing to do. At Warmly we celebrate quick decision-making and moving on.

> Became master of guerilla tactics. Manisha & Carina went undercover in person at Ben & Jerry’s, Lush, Northface, Trader Joe’s & Coles to talk to managers about their employee community-building efforts. Alan and I went undercover at the Boulder Customer Success Meetup and landed 7 new user research interviews and validated many of the pain points we had heard:

📚Failures/Learnings:

> Top Pain Point: After our 23 more nuanced discovery calls, we think we can build a business around: customer success communities (communities that pay!). Second place was: smart enterprise directories. Next week the goal is to build conviction on this.

> People don’t love the tool, they love the topic: Why would a Hubspot customer want to participate in a community of other buyers? Because they love discussing the latest tips & tricks in marketing, not Hubspot. We really like Alex Iskold’s thesis on this.

> Some pain, software doesn’t need to solve: we learned that community is super important for frontline service workers at large franchise companies (one of our top discovered pain points). But only community within their franchise, not across all of the corporate workforce. They don’t need a new app for this - they mostly love their face-to-face time and WhatsApp group chats. Learning is to make sure that software is actually need for what you’re solving!

🙏Gratitudes & Awesome Pushes Pulled:

> Thank you to all the 23 amazing humans who graciously offered to give us their time to talk about the interesting world of customer success and keeping customers happy.

> Thank you to fellow Techstars batch company Charmed who hosted our team for beer pong this week 🍻

> Ani (PushPull) for pushing Frank’s (PushPull) pull for intros to young people interested in the intersection of tech and policy

> Robert (PushPull) for pushing Alisa’s (PushPull) pull to for healthy recipes

📊KPIs: Irrelevant for now while we’re all hands on deck evaluating customer communities

On Killing PushPull for consumer communities: “Entrepreneurial judgment is the ability to tell the difference between a situation that’s not working but persistence and iteration will ultimately prove it out versus a situation that’s not working and additional effort is a destructive waste of time and radical change is necessary.” - Marc Andreessen … It's so hard to know for sure, but I believe in our enterprise pivot over persisting and iterating on the consumer product. Onwards and upwards.

Warmly,

Max

Ways I'd love to help you: My PushPull

*Want to see an insider scoop on our process? We rated each potential business across a variety of factors including: pain point severity, 10 year vision, TAM, top tailwinds in our favor and of course, personal interest. Looked like this:

Example 2: Update 11:

Subject Line: [Update #11] 💺📣 Warmly: onboarding first customers, investor suggestions and some COVID19 memes

Hey {{First | fallback: Warmly Friend}},

What do we do again? Warmly turns your best customers into your best salespeople. Our tools for customer success teams automatically generate incremental sales by leveraging the power of your customers and their networks. Our first tool TrackAdvocates tracks the job changes of your customers to generate great warm leads and reduce churn.

💡An ask: Do you know 1 awesome B2B SAAS investor you’d vouch for that would add value to Team Warmly? We’re in the early stages of collecting names of great humans to invest in our first round. Preference for folks who love GTM strategy or sales/marketing. Please reply back with their name and we may ask you for an intro!

TL;DR: Closed 3 more sales, made sales collateral, onboarded first customers, iterated on drafts of our demo day pitch script and tested our limits by overloading ourselves with too many sales calls, new trial customers and product building.

📊KPIs:

> Customers: 16 (6 paying (+3 this week) and 10 trials (+4 this week)). Average MRPU (Monthly Revenue per User): $116

> Customer interviews: 21

🎉 Accomplishments/Wins:

> Amazing quote from a prospective customer: “I do a lot of these demo calls, mostly because I feel bad for people. But I’ve never seen something until today that actually shows value that would augment our existing workflow and get us new deals and reduce churn. This is awesome and I know I can make a case for us to buy it”

> Onboarded first customers: Got customer data from first customers and sent them back an enriched version of their customer data plus all tracked job changes. This was the first time we delivered actual customer value and it felt great

> Launched our sales deck & demo sandbox: As we refine our sales process we’ve created a sales deck, sales demo video (check it out!) and ability to run a demo of the product where we (on a sales call) change our job on LinkedIn and we’ll detect the change!

Sales Paradise (left) and Scraper’s Dungeon (right) is where our team spends most of their time. Me with my makeshift standing desk and attempt at a “fun” background, and Alan & Carina staying up late, coding in their twin beds.

📚Failures/Learnings:

>: Being an honest salesperson: As a company we decided that if we don’t think our product is a good fit on a sales call that we wouldn’t push the person we’re selling to believing it to be true and buying something we don’t believe will drive them value. Instead we want to put good karma out there by being explicit about the lack of fit on the call and spending the remaining time figuring out how to help the other person the most with their goals.

> Legal Stuff #2 NDA, DPA, DPIA: More interesting legal stuff as we learn more about data processing under GPDR and how customers are concerned about how their data is kept, stored and processed. We needed to create a standard Warmly NDA, understand what is needed for a DPA (data processing agreement) and make an internal DPIA (data privacy impact assessment)

> Ramble less: Did some mock investor meetings and got the feedback that I ramble too much. The goal is to focus on impact per unit word - to make the point and shut up.

🙏Gratitudes:

> Thank you to the 21 incredible customer interviewees who took time out of their day (mainly Techstars companies!) to help tell us about their day-to-day and hear our pitch. And thank you to our customers trusting us to deliver them value!

> Thank you to the pizza guy who wasn’t afraid to drop off some delicious XL pizzas to us in Boulder. So tasty to get some food we didn’t make ourselves

> Thank you to Kelly Dwyer who gave excellent advice on how to make a fun, inviting video meeting background

> Thank you to a new investor & advisor who committed to join our pre-seed round - we’re so excited to have you on board :)

Overloaded, overstressed & the end of Techstars: This week I felt very overwhelmed and suffered from an extreme lack of sleep trying to balance sales calls, Techstars Demo Day pitch practice, and investor deck & pipeline creation. It was too much. I looked at the rest of my team and saw something very similar - too much work too fast too many new customers too many sales calls. A startup is a marathon not a sprint but because we pivoted during Techstars to get to where we are, we feel that we have to sprint to have a top notch demo day. On top of all of this we only have 3 (!) weeks left in the Techstars program. The time has FLOWN by and we’ve learned SO much. With everything going on, with being remote, it’s been hard for me the last few weeks though to cherish and really love all that the program has to offer and that makes me sad. I hope for a more balanced week next week.

If you’ve made it this far…. A few of our favorite coronavirus memes & videos:

Hilarious YouTube parody “Hello from the inside - Adele”

Example #3: Update 17:

Subject Line: [Update #17] Warmly Bi-weekly: Y-Combinator S20, new KPIs, Hello World blogpost

Hey {{First Name | fallback: Warmly Friend}},

What do we do again? Warmly builds products that leverage your existing customers to find new ones. Our TrackAdvocates product tracks the job changes of your customer contacts like decision makers or customer advocates by easily syncing with your CRM. This lets you know when they change jobs so you can resell them on the software they already love.

TL;DR: We are doing Y-Combinator this summer (yes, we love accelerators), we’re improving our key KPIs to focus on what moves the needle for the business, and are gearing up to take on interns (priority for those affected by COVID).

📊 *new* KPIs:

Time to switch to big kid metrics. No more cumulative customer counts. No more trialing customers. Aiming for 10% w/w growth through the summer.

> Primary we will report: MRR (as measured by customers with invoice completed)

> Secondary we will report: B2B decision makers identified (as measured by potential software buyers with whom we have a persistent identifier, eg. we can add them to our growing customer network

> Tertiary we will report: WAU (as measured by users who logged in to their Warmly dashboard)

🎉 Accomplishments/Wins:

> Accepted to Y-Combinator: Our team was accepted to Y-Combinator (

> We can pay ourselves/team now: Apparently real companies offer salary. The co-founders and I have never taken a salary before and now that we’re starting to think about making our first hires it’s time to get our backend in order. We went with Gusto!

> Warmly Intern Szn: with the summer approaching and so much to get done, the team has decided to take on some interns to help across the board with software engineering, growth, sales ops and data science. We’re aiming to hire those affected by COVID. We’ll be introducing them to everyone throughout the summer!

> Launched our first blogpost: Dear World, Hello… Warmly, Us! … as we begin to explore the world of content marketing to drive inbound, I’m excited to share the beginning of Warmly via our first blogpost!

Virtual game time! The team and team +1s play a game of Skribbl.io, a drawing guessing game. Val was usually the highest scorer and I won the least improved award for sucking at drawing.

📚Failures/Learnings:

> Teaser customers: a few times now, a prospect has either (a) agreed to be a customer verbally or (b) promised to “start next month” but then abruptly goes silent. These teaser customers are frustrating because they get really excited about what we’re doing, we seem to make a connection with them, and they may even email us saying “what are the steps to get started” but then ghost! This baffles me (but apparently is normal) and I struggle to understand what the delta was. Perhaps their quarterly priorities changed? Perhaps we weren’t talking to the right stakeholders? Perhaps they were being nice?

> The difficulty of the sales to CSM handoff: Once a sales person (typically me or Val) complete a sale, they need to hand that relationship over to the customer success manager (typically Val or Alan) who can help onboard and get that customer set up. The salesperson needs to take meticulous notes and make sure the CSM understands the context for that customer, otherwise the hand off can be messy

🙏Gratitudes:

> Thank you to Natty Zola our Techstars Boulder managing director for being super attentive and available as we navigate our first ever fundraise. His duties ended a few weeks ago but yet he continues to be our rock each and every day

> Thank you to David Brown our counsel for helping us understand the technical nuances of the term sheet and what the common gotcha’s are for legal language

> Thank you to our YC interviewers who took a chance on us to let us into the Bay Area’s best accelerator program. We hope to show you all that our team can accomplish

> Thank you to my cofounders Val, Carina & Alan for holding down the fort this past week to allow me a few days vacation (road trip through Yellowstone!) to celebrate the end of this fundraise. It allowed me to recharge my batteries before we head into YC!

Warmly,

Max

Ways we can help each other

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What happened in Week 7 of Y Combinator?

Check out my cofounder Alan Zhao’s post Week 7 in Y Combinator.

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Want to get in touch or send thoughts about the post? Would love to hear them at [email protected]

Hello! I’m Carina, Co-founder & Head of Product at Warmly. Last month, I shared in Left Google to start a startup — What it’s like in Y Combinator that I left my beloved Google Maps family of 4 years to start a company with Alan, Max, and Val.

This week I wanted to share why warmth and authenticity matters so much to Warmly, and how it impacts everything we do—from our team culture, to our company mission, and how we interact with our users and investors.

Quick updates

Before I dive in, just wanted to catch you up on some exciting news this month!‍

🎉 We've raised $2.1M in seed funding as announced in the Forbes article. Our seed is led by James Currier from NFX with participation from Natty Zola of MatchstickVC, the Xoogler Angel Syndicate, Elizabeth Weil, Mike Vernal and Harry Stebbings.

Last month of Y Combinator! Side note: Warmly decided to opt out of presenting at this year’s YC Demo Day, as we’re not looking to raise additional funds right now.‍

Last week, we began Sequoia’s Company Design Program. It’s headed by Jess Lee and James Buckhouse. They’ve been really inspiring and immensely helpful with our user and product story. (Check out their YouTube videos: Jess speaks about Founding Polyvore and Becoming a Sequoia Partner, and James shares key lessons on Story-Driven Design.)‍

😊 Our team is growing! Zack Zeyu is officially joining Warmly! Zack became friends with Alan back in HackReactor, and had been so incredible helping us out during our early startup days. He’s an amazingly talented self-taught engineer coming from finance. He’s super smart, driven, humble, humorous, and also talented in so many ways beyond engineering. We’re so grateful he’s part of the Warmly family.‍

👋 Interns last week & goodbyes. I’m incredibly proud of everything they’ve accomplished and how much they’ve grown personally and professionally. Amanda, Brandon, Emily, Grant, Hernán, Natalie, Sanil—you’ve influenced our hearts and our company forever, thank you so much for being a part of Warmly’s journey!‍

⛰ I completed a life goal I’ve had for the past 2 years!—Finished a 200-mile backpacking trip on the John Muir Trail ending at the top of Mt Whitney, the tallest mountain in the contiguous U.S at 14,508 ft. Thank you so much Warmly team for keeping everything accelerating while I was on this journey!

🏝 Warmly relocated to Hawaii for the next 2 months to be able to work in person! It’s nice to be able to collaborate and hang out with everyone after being apart during COVID lockdown.

How warmth & authenticity guides everything we do at Warmly

When students ask for advice on which company to join, I tell them that for me, the people (your manager, your teammates) is the number one most important thing. Even more important than the product, your projects, salary. Why? People who you surround yourself with have a huge influence on your mindset, happiness, aspirations, and growth.

Why I stayed over 4 years on Google Maps was because of the people. Why I made the hard decision to leave Google—to leave an amazing team, an incredible manager, getting to influence and shape the culture and infra for over 200 engineers—was again because of the people, my cofounders Alan, Max, and Val.

What’s so special about these people?

“When you meet them, you can't help but feel the warmth of the team...” says our angel investor and ex-COO of Gainsight Allison Pickens in her blog post Why Every CRO Should Know Warmly. That’s how I felt when I worked with Max on Google Maps Where’s Waldo April Fools. And how I felt when I met Val and Alan. We each came from very different backgrounds and have such a spectrum of personalities and skills. But what we had in common was our warmth and authenticity, how incredibly driven we each were, and how we strived to do things differently than the norm.

Warmth and authenticity is ingrained in so much of our everyday, from our culture to our company mission.

Warmth in our Culture

The first month we started the company, we crazily enough decided to all live in a house together in Boulder. At the time I knew Max well and had only worked with Val and Alan for a week. Yep, a week. We intentionally spent a lot time to get to know each other those first months. In the evenings, we’d cook together, play games like Big Talk and Askhole, and share our favorite hobbies like wushu (from Alan) and free-style rapping (from Max) during weekly team bondings. We made mental health a priority—openly sharing how we felt, including if we were feeling down or stressed. We had weekly gratitudes to appreciate each other. As we grew closer, we opened up more and more of our true selves to each other. We shared our quirks, fears, aspirations, backstories, and even parts of ourselves we don’t love. And yes, we cried more than once together. By the end of the time in Boulder with them, they felt like family. These were people who understood me, who’d support me through both the good and bad times, who want to see me win in life.

When we brought on new hires and interns, we wanted to keep this culture. For example in your first week, every person on the team would meet with you to introduce themselves and get to know you. And our earliest traditions have stuck: weekly mental health check-ins, gratitudes, team bondings. What’s also really cool are our weekly team learnings, where we each share what we each learned. I love our focus on constant personal growth. Even if you’re not a founder, you get to hear about fundraising and product direction. You get to hear about engineering learnings, sales learnings, user research learnings.

And it’s been felt. In our intern exit interviews, we had overwhelmingly positive feedback about our team culture. Interns loved that everyone at Warmly felt so warm, they felt comfortable reaching out to any person or any founder, and they got to work on really impactful projects that they would have never imagined doing as an intern.

Warmth towards our Users

We try to bring this same warmth and love to our users. Instead of making them email support, we gave them a direct line to our CEO’s cellphone, and we created a shared Slack channel with our users so they can directly message the founders. On our weekly warm leads email, we add jokes to make them laugh and updates on Warmly so they can be a part of our startup journey. We also open meetings with a fun virtual ice-breaker to try to get to know each other more.

Warmth with our Mentors

Just as we surround ourselves with amazing people within the company, the people we have chosen as investors were not those who just gave us the highest valuation. We chose people we truly believed were good-hearted, smart people, who we want to form lifelong friendships with. To all our mentors and investors—we are incredibly grateful to you for sharing your experience and wisdom with us, helping guide us through difficult decisions, always rooting for our success, and believing in us as individuals.

Sharing Warmth with our Community

We’ve received so much care and help from our mentors and peer founders to get us to this point. We want to make sure to give back to our community. We block out time each week to help out other founders in Techstars, Y Combinator, and Sequoia. We also built the PushPull community platform to facilitate people helping each other, and we try to personally push people’s pulls each week.

Spreading Warmth with our Company Mission

Lastly, our mission. At the highest level, Warmly aims to spread a cycle of warmth to the world. We want to create a world where normal people can innovate and create products to solve real-world pains. And where the users can have a warm close relationship with the founders/company to help make the product even better, and be the champion to help spread the product so others can have their lives transformed as well.

Our first product makes a step towards this by enabling customer champions to partner with the sales team of a B2B product they love to get it adopted at their new company.

We hope the founders of these companies adopt practices to create a warm authentic culture for their employees, and we hope they spread the warmth back to their community as well. :)

What happened in Week 8 of Y Combinator?

Check out my cofounder Max Greenwald’s post Week 8 in Y-Combinator: Why 376 people help Warmly regularly - The Power of a Weekly Mailing List.‍

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Want to get in touch or send thoughts about the post? Would love to hear them at [email protected]

Imagine a world where you could harness the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to tailor information specific to each visitor who lands on your website. Picture this: someone comes across your company's website, let's say Namecoach, and instead of bombarding them with generic content, AI steps in to provide a personalized experience. Sounds exciting, doesn't it?

AI is here to transform the sales landscape by shifting the focus from variables to engagement. Rather than relying solely on traditional variables like demographics or past purchases, AI opens the door to a multitude of engagement-related factors. It takes into account how users interact with your website, providing a deeper understanding of their needs and preferences.

Transforming Sales with Real Time Insights

Take the case of an SDR who spends hours manually dialing numbers, only to face constant rejection and hang-ups. It's a discouraging experience, to say the least. But what if there was a solution that could automate intent data and help SDRs sell more effectively? That’s where Warmly comes in.

Let's dive into a scenario many SDRs can relate to. Picture yourself as an SDR, diligently dialing number after number, hoping for a breakthrough. However, the reality hits hard—rejection becomes a constant companion. It can be disheartening, questioning your abilities and resilience in the face of continuous hang-ups and dismissive responses.

But fear not! Warmly has come to the rescue with Real Time Insights, a game-changing product that automates intent data and transforms the way SDRs sell. This innovative solution empowers SDRs to tap into real time insights, providing valuable information on prospect intent and enabling them to make more targeted and impactful connections. With Real Time Insights by their side, SDRs can overcome the challenges of rejection and engage with prospects in a way that truly resonates.

Enhancing Customer Experience with AI-powered Chatbots

AI doesn't just stop at personalizing engagements and automating intent data. It also holds the potential to enhance the overall customer experience. By leveraging AI-powered chatbots, companies can provide instant and efficient support to their customers, 24/7. These chatbots are equipped with natural language processing capabilities, ensuring that customer queries are understood and addressed promptly.

Imagine a customer browsing your website late at night, seeking assistance. Instead of encountering a cold, impersonal automated response, they engage with an AI-powered chatbot that feels natural and human-like. The chatbot understands their queries, provides relevant information, and even offers personalized recommendations. It's like having a dedicated customer support representative at their service, anytime they need it.

AI's emergence is transforming the sales landscape, changing business-customer connections with personalized engagements and automated intent data. With AI's power, we create tailored experiences, overcome rejection challenges, and provide exceptional customer support. Welcome to the AI-powered era of sales, where personalization and efficiency converge to shape a future defined by success. Embrace this evolution and unlock AI’s potential.

TL;DR:

• Warmly shares a case study about a customer, Strive, who churned.
• Strive's challenges with Warmly included a lack of immediate wins, platform slowness, and usability issues.
• Warmly learned from these issues and made improvements to their product and commitment to customer success.
• Strive's CEO appreciated Warmly's efforts and believes their product could still be beneficial for other organizations.
• Warmly offers warm customer engagement alongside AI and automation to prioritize customer success.

Anti-Case Study? Do you mean not a good story? Shared by us publicly? Are we out of our minds?

Yes. Below we’re going to post about a customer that churned.

It’s not all sunshine and rainbows in the business world, and we believe there’s much to learn from our missteps and failures. You deserve the truth.

Buckle up, readers. In this blog post, we will cover:

• A partnership that didn’t meet expectations with Strive, who hoped to boost top-of-the-funnel conversions.
• Discuss Strive’s challenges with Warmly: a lack of immediate wins, platform slowness, and usability issues.
• Show how we improved our product and our commitment to customer success going forward.

Customer That Churned

On Feb. 27, 2022, we signed Strive, which offers employee experience technology. They were our 7th “Design Partner” (early customer) and approached us seeking a solution to increase their top-of-the-funnel conversions. Hopefully, they’d get more appointments and convert site visitors into clients.

Six months into their contract, the results were less than expected. Despite promising conversions from other customers, our collaboration yielded one meeting, which did not convert into a sale. We decided to interview the Strive team to understand why. We spoke with Strive’s CEO, Zach (our executive sponsor) and their Director of Marketing, Rachel (our champion) to get feedback.

Rachel had aimed to book more meetings by using Warmly to get notified when prospects were navigating Strive’s website, then Warm Call them immediately on the site. She told us:

• “[When trying to live chat with site visitors] what we noticed was that many people on our site would see the conversation prompt pop up and immediately exit. This gave us no opportunity to engage with them as they would close the conversation before it could even begin. Consequently, we were not achieving the results we had been seeking. In the end, we couldn’t justify the time our sales team was investing in this effort as it was not moving the needle.” — Rachel Bergman, Director of Marketing at Strive

We worked hard for them but ultimately decided to let them churn, return the second half of their annual commitment and instead ask them for a closer look at the issues so we could learn.

A Closer Look at the Issues

Problem 1: Winning Doesn’t Always Come Quickly

Warmly’s CSM set up Strive’s account in about 30 minutes, focusing on being a lightweight and an easy-to-use tool. But this was likely too fast. Strive’s CEO told us:

• “I think it probably would have been super helpful and given the team a ton of confidence if Warmly was in the driver's seat [from the beginning]. If we were able to get a demo booked or basically get us to a closed deal early then Warmly we’d be gravy the rest of the year. We needed to get a win early to get confidence.” — Zach Beegal, CEO of Strive

🔮 Warmly Learning: Our customers need to get success, fast! And they need our help to do it. Now our CSM team has an internal metric they track we call TTFW, or Time To First Win. With TTFW the CSM team is focused on their ability to work with customers until they’re getting value and using Warmly every day.

Problem 2: Platform Slowness

Processing millions of sessions for our customers turned out to be harder than we thought. Strive’s team experienced loading problems and had difficulty viewing visitor activity on the platform. The slowness made for a poor user experience which caused frustration and in turn, deterred their team from wanting to use it every day to nab leads.

🔮 Warmly Learning: Real-time engagement needs excellent speed and scalability. We then doubled down on making our platform way faster (10x faster actually).

Problem 3: Too Much Effort To Use

• “The concept of catching leads at the right moment and minimizing back-and-forth is impressive for driving top-of-the-funnel growth, but it was a lot of effort for us to learn that and take action on it.” — Rachel Bergman

When Strive told us that they were not getting use of the platform a key reason was that they were spending a lot of team trying to Warm Call everyone who came to their site. It was a lot of effort so we tried to help by literally putting “a man on the inside” and had one of our SDRs fill in for them to try it out for them too. Strive found our team's dedication impressive and appreciated the effort put into making the partnership work - and while the connection rates went up, we couldn’t do that forever (the cost wasn’t there). So we had to solve the problem of having the humans at our customer accounts only taking the time when it really matters - and at the right time of day for them.

🔮 Warmly Learning: Our customers need a level of enablement so they can learn a new motion and we can ensure it fits into their daily workflow. From there we decided to add AI and automation so we could actually just run the platform for Customers without Customers doing any work.

Problem 4: Strive Had Little Web Traffic

Strive is a startup and thus did not have a lot of web traffic. The problem with not having a lot of web traffic is that you’re limited in the number of daily attempts you have to get new sales from it. Our typical customers these days are more up-market — companies ranging from 50 to 500 employees in size, with web traffic typically exceeding 5,000 visitors per month.

🔮 Warmly Learning: We’ve historically worked better with larger companies. But because we want to work with smaller startups too, to address their needs, we’ve recently launched AI Prospecting (auto-email personalized emails to everyone who comes by your site). This automation empowers even small teams to expand their outreach efforts without exerting excessive effort. By automating these processes, we now help companies maximize their outreach potential and achieve a 10x increase in their outreach efforts.

So what happened with Strive? Churn & Refund

Strive, Design Partner #7 of Warmly, churned. And we don’t blame them for it!

Warmly believes in an excellent customer experience, and even though Strive still had six months left on their annual contract, we gave them a refund. We didn’t feel right taking their money when they weren’t excited to use it. Instead, we asked them to do this anti-case study.

🔮 Warmly Learning: Keep your customers, even those who eventually leave, on good terms.

Should Other Companies Use Warmly?

Yes, we hope so! While our collaboration with their company back in 2022 may not have produced the anticipated outcomes, the efficacy of our product today, given our learnings, should not be in question. Plus the churn was also more a matter of fit within their specific operational environment. Zach, Strive’s CEO, still thinks our product could prove beneficial for other organizations especially because of our dedication to our customers.

• “I had high expectations. Your sales pitch was very good, and I really liked working with your CEO Max. I do have to give you guys credit for the partnership mentality you had when things were starting to go south. Getting your COO involved, running email campaigns, and doing all of that for free. You did give it a good effort, so I can't say you didn't do that. It was going downward, and I was expecting you to cut bait quicker, but you gave it a real try, and I appreciate that.” — Zach Beegal

Before considering working with us, think about whether you would be a good fit; At Warmly, we specifically cater to businesses prioritizing warm customer engagement alongside AI and automation. If you make the choice to work with us, we promise to provide insightful metrics, an increase in pipeline and booked meetings. With Warmly, you're not just purchasing a product though — you're gaining a devoted partner committed to your success.

Have you ever had a churn you learned from?

Tell us your story to be featured by emailing [email protected].

The Pitfalls of Old-School Outbound

Outbound isn't dead, it just needs to evolve with the shifting buying landscape.

Outbound sequencing tools have made it that easy to carpet bomb your market with spam.

When used irresponsibly, you turn off prospects, burn through domains (I've done this personally), and waste resources that could've been used for greater return.

A Shifting Paradigm

As discussed by Keegan Otter (Software Cowboy)🤠 and our friends at Tourial:

- Buyers now spend a significant amount of time on self-education before speaking to a sales rep

- Buyers are expecting B2C like experiences in B2B interactions - timely, personalized engagement.

You can learn more on how Tourial adapts their outbound to today's buyers.

Rethinking The Outbound Sales Email for Today's Market

Ensure that outreach is tailored towards the stage of the buyer's journey.

Give (a lot of value) only outbound emails

"Give only" emails for people who are not at the decision/purchase stage of the journey.

We publish the "Warm Sales Insights" weekly newsletter where we present companies in buy-mode for SaaS products similar to yours (e.g., your competitors).

We're giving away free warm leads exhibiting buying intent in the form of a weekly newsletter. It gives the rep an entry point to start a conversation.

Trigger-based outreach.

People write in for more or sign up for our actual product to get more warm leads.

The best part is that this newsletter is a cold outbound evergreen email campaign targeted to salespeople. The "newsletter" base grows weekly as we auto-subscribe more salespeople to it from our email database.

We can reach a wide audience who then become familiar with our brand over time.

Helps to bridge the mental shortcut of associating Warmly with warm leads, especially when they come to the site.

Social proof notification outbound emails

For our Zoom nametags product, we created something we lovingly termed "intra-company adoption" emails, alerting other company people that the Warmly nametags have been approved in their organizations.

We contextualized the email with each send by updating the "number of people in your organization" using Warmly's nametags.

Social proof!

This doesn't feel like spam, has high click-through rates and low unsubscribes, and leads to an increasing density of folks signing up for our nametags product within an organization.

We did this to solve what Andrew Chen, a16z General Partner, refers to as the "The Cold Start" problem, which is the challenge new platforms or services face when starting from scratch and attracting an initial user base.

The email is so natural and doesn't feel like an outbound campaign, yet it attracts more users onto our platform.

Once the number of users within a company meets a threshold, our product-led sales team steps in and we begin to upsell.

Outbound emails that amplify the partner tool ecosystem

We use our intent data to discover whether prospects are using partner tools in our ecosystem like Hubspot, Salesforce, ZoomInfo, Apollo, Outreach, etc.

Then we send a contextual email that specifies how Warmly can help the prospects' team amplify the power of their existing techstack.

You'll notice that we have a fair number of links as well that route back to our website.

When a prospect lands on our website from an outbound email, we're able to automatically ID them using Warmly. The rep is alerted via slack, then has the opportunity to start a conversation with the prospect right on our site via the Warmly chat widget.

Again, we've automated this sequence to fire so reps don't have to manually send anything.

Hands free prospecting!

Bottom-of-funnel outbound sales emails

Once we find that an account is surging 🔥 or in buy mode (thanks to the intent data we've collected on our paltform), we shift from "give only" emails to more sales-focused ones.

We love to use tools like sendspark to embed personalized videos that add a human touch to the outreach. The dynamic thumbnail of a real human invites you in.

Notice in the email below we use "competitor intent," referring to when the prospect is researching a competitor. You can trigger an alert for the sales team to reach out when this happens (but in our we do it automatically).

We use 6sense third party data to understand when competitors are being researched by our target accounts.

Often times we'll multi-thread the conversation, which means targeting people not just in the buying committee, but champions, users and other internal stakeholders as well.

In the case below we trigger the outbound email to the junior sales reps because everyone has the potential to influence the buying decision and we want as many internal champions as we can get!

They could bring it up with their manager if they like how we've outreached them (yes this happens a lot).

Omnichannel outbound

Right, we don't just use email. We take an omnichannel approach to outbound and diversify across email, LinkedIn, chat, phone, sms, and others.

For LinkedIn especially we like to combine our intent data with LinkedIn automation tools like Salesflow, which allows us to trigger a LinkedIn sequence based on intent.

Below is a connection request campaign to buying committee members for high intent accounts that have expressed interest in our product.

We know people are busy so we try to convey as much relevant information in as few words as possible. In addition to personalized videos we like to use product tours/demo environments using tools like Tourial or TestBox.

We've found that buyers don't love the traditional sales process of a string of meetings before seeing how the product works.

Sophisticated buyers typically have a solution in mind from speaking with friends/colleagues and want one more confirmation that it works the way they expected.

If you're slow to show them, they might just go with a competitor who was able to move faster.

So we try to give them the product experience right when they're ready.

Wrapping up

As of November 2023, we've grown MRR at 30% MoM this past year. It gets harder every month because the way the math works but at the same time easier because these incremental improvements we've made to our outbound have built us long-term brand equity that compounds over time.

When in need of entrepreneurial guidance, I don’t seek wisdom from my mentors or investors. Rather, I turn to my mother, Rachel Greenwald, a professional matchmaker who has successfully orchestrated 850 marriages over the past two decades. Envision a delightful blend of "Fiddler on the Roof" and Harvard Business School. Given such an inspirational figure for a mother, it's hardly surprising that my initial business venture revolved around a ‘Tinder for co-founders.’

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The parallels between dating and starting a business are more significant than one might imagine. In both arenas, the crux is to foster authentic connections. Be it pursuing a romantic interest or sealing a deal, here are five insights from my matchmaker mother to help your business thrive and endure.

1. Navigating Co-founder Relationships 

The statistics surrounding co-founder relationships are rather dismal, with nearly half disintegrating within four years. The primary lesson from my mother in identifying an ideal partnership involved asking insightful questions. When conducting reference checks for potential co-founders, she suggested bypassing former colleagues and opting for their siblings instead. Her rationale was that Silicon Valley is brimming with talented engineers. Our business's success would hinge not on exceptional coding capabilities, but on the individual's intrinsic nature. And who could provide a more accurate depiction of this than siblings who've shared memorable childhood experiences?

2. Engaging Investors

In my early attempts at raising seed funding for my company, I played up our team's impressive credentials, including Forbes 30u30, TechStars, Y Combinator, and Google alumni. The approach, however, fell flat. My mother then shared that fruitful conversations in dating aren't necessarily about sharing facts but about expressing authenticity. This is where the power of vulnerability comes into play. She advised being candid with investors about the challenges of raising funds in a pandemic-stricken world through Zoom. I shifted my narrative from our achievements to our setbacks, and the approach resonated with Harry Stebbings, managing partner at 20VC, who decided to invest:

3. Understanding Your Product

When users log onto Zoom, they rarely contemplate the interface or the placement of buttons. Their thoughts are consumed by the anticipation of connecting with someone new and making a positive impression, hoping to form a lucrative relationship. The most adept product designers focus less on granular details and more on the user's emotional journey. While consulting on our flagship product's design, my mother emphasized the significance of making the user feel acknowledged. She urged us to concentrate on how the user would feel navigating the product, and that insight guided our design process. Our approach to new features now begins with outlining the intended user experience. The result? A user experience that resonates. As Maya Angelou observed, “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

4. Approaching Your Sales Prospect

Much like the early stages of romance, you aim to make a favorable impression, armed with preparation. How can one achieve this while juggling back-to-back sales meetings? Drawing inspiration from the pre-date briefings my mother provides her clients, my company developed a tool that functions as a business meeting precursor over Zoom. Our dashboard gathers crucial information about the individual you're scheduled to meet, such as their LinkedIn profile, company, title, mutual connections, and even your email history with them. Warmly serves as a silent assistant, providing reminders of your shared interests, and facilitating effortless conversation and connection. Interestingly, some of our users have also employed our tool for their virtual first dates!

5. Growing Your Business

What motivates people to go on first dates? It isn't to dazzle their date to the greatest extent, treat them to an extravagant dinner, or aim for a first kiss. Ideally, the goal is to establish a relationship that is mutually beneficial. The most valuable insight I've gleaned from “business dating” is the importance of laying a solid foundation for long-term relationships. For instance, my former supervisor at Google, whom I worked tirelessly for, became one of Warmly's initial angel investors. A college friend undertook a covert operation to acquire our domain name, Warmly.ai. I met Elizabeth Weil, managing partner at Scribble Ventures while seeking running companions in Palo Alto. She not only became our initial investor but our families even vacation together. Oftentimes, new acquaintances may not turn out as expected, yet they can lead to something even better.

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You can never predict whether the person you're meeting will become your future co-founder, employee, or even the future partner of your best friend. The key, much like in dating, is to prioritize building a relationship. With that foundation, every other aspect will be exponentially more fruitful. Thanks Mom.

When I was brought onto the team in May as an intern, I was thrilled to learn we’d be having a work trip to Sitka, AK. I had been to Alaska a number of times for cold-weather training while in the military, so the irony of going back as a civilian with a company named Warmly was particularly delightful!

DAY 1

Getting out of the tiny airport was the easiest flight experience ever, and we were greeted with fresh, crisp air and beautiful, green mountains behind a charming town. Half of our team was staying in a local’s house, with the other half at the Sitka Fine Arts Camp, our work HQ for the trip. We drove a mile from the airport, along the water’s edge, and onto the campus, with wooden buildings, tall trees with frequent bald eagles, and a stream running through it!

We had our first formal meeting down at a rocky beach where we made s’mores, had many first face-to-face chats, and drew pictures of the future on the backs of paper plates. We had our first Sitka creative moment -- no one had pens to draw, so we charred the tips of our wooden marshmallow skewers. Definitely a great first in-person bonding activity.

It started to drizzle, which we learned was pretty standard throughout the day, so we wrapped up the evening by explaining our cave-art-like drawings. Burning them makes them come true, right?

DAY 2

After breakfast at the fine arts camp, we had our opening work meeting in our vaulted ceiling, wooden office space, the only downside to which was the echo! We ended the meeting with a brainstorming session, led by Max, on what we were interested in finding out from Warmly’s launch with the Zoom App store, and what methods we could use for measurement. We were able to shake off some angst about the launch and have comforting side convos about what we were thinking and feeling.

At the end of the workday, Shep led a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion session where we moved throughout the room according to our own identity perceptions. It was fun to watch as we walked who was going to each identity based on the prompts, and people vacillating between several.

DAY 3

We found a cool Gazebo, above the campus stream, where we could take our Sitka team pic. We crammed all of our virtual and physical people into it, snapped the picture, and (like any good tech startup) jetted up to the office to start work.

In the afternoon, Carina and Glen held a chalkboarding session (on a real chalkboard!) about a specific product development. We each took 10 minutes to think up our most viral version of this (secret) product, shared with each other, and then voted. This was a really fun session because it displayed not just our own personal interests, but also what we each thought others would be attracted to.

DAY 4

We started the morning with an intimate meditation session - only three of us showed. I don’t actually know how to meditate, but I followed Max and Jim’s lead, and in no time I was doing a really poor job of not getting lost in my thoughts. When I opened my eyes, Max and Jim were staring at me, kindly not interrupting what they assumed was me meditating.

The highlight of work today was a Zoom meeting with one of our investors and experts, James Currier, GP at NfX. It’s always exciting to hear thoughts from a leader in your industry, and especially when they’re talking right to you about your company, tying in decades-old relevant anecdotes!

We also had our “Warmite” graduation, where all the new employees became full-fledged members. Totally corny and totally fun. I enjoyed getting random pieces of info about each person for the slide show, like this super cute one of Jim and his wife!

DAY 5

Today was boating in the Sitka Sound! We rented a couple small boats and took groups either sightseeing or fishing. (If you know how to fish, please join our team so that we catch more fish on our next trip!) Whales were amazing to see, but otters were the cutest and most entertaining of the wildlife. Several people found out their tolerance levels for boats on the ocean. Trooper awards go out to Glen Lipka and Nicole Creshon.

DAY 6

A cool thing that started happening toward the end of the trip was random people in Sitka coming up to us and asking what Warmly is, because they had seen us walking around in our bright purple hoodies throughout the week?

Our last activity night was really fun. The Lipka fam guided us in a musical rhythm and tone session. It was fun to see how talented the kids were, even though they got skunked in Bugout chess by me and Max.

DAY 7

Several of us took a last drive, into the mountains of Sitka, and then boarded our plane. The only thing many of us may not miss is the slightly ever-present and not entirely irrational fear (exhilaration for some) of a bear being around a corner or tree. We’re unanimously looking forward to the next offsite trip!

Written by Alan Zhao, CTO & Cofounder

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During my time at Warmly, I've had the great privilege of working with an incredible team of engineers. They are the people driving the technical engine of the company. And we have all learned a lot from each other.

Our culture and how we operate have been shaped by the mistakes we've made and learned from in the past. Below are 9 standout tenets:

1. We don’t repaint the Taj Mahal.

We focus on outcome, not output. It is crucial that we avoid the engineering build trap of building for the sake of building. We never want to throw time and effort into the machine without a firm strategy. Everything we release at Warmly had been prioritized for highest business impact. Our job is to build the next Taj Mahal, not recoat it with another layer of paint.

2. We don't prescribe solutions.

When collaborating on product ideas, leadership does not prescribe a specific solution but paints a clear picture of the problem or opportunity and then brings the engineers into the meetings with customers. That way, by the time the tickets are reviewed, everyone is on the same page. Leadership decides the “why”. Product and engineering collaboratively decide the “what”. Engineering decides the “how”.

3. We don't burn ourselves out.

Using hard work to solve all our problems is a crutch for real innovation. It’s also a depleting resource that may not have the intended long-term effect. There's a saying that startups don't die, they commit suicide. Trying to sustain hard work for long periods with no end in sight leads to burnout, frustration, and eventually churn. We take care of our mental health and are always thinking of creative ways to do more with less. We set a very high bar during hiring so everyone on the team is already efficient, can self-organize, and is intrinsically motivated.

4. We don't micromanage.

While newer engineers at Warmly are encouraged to over-communicate changes and run them by tech leads, senior engineers maintain and “own” parts of the code base and have more discretion. This allows our engineers to preserve personal autonomy and flexibility, while also controlling against the codebase descending into chaos.

5. We don't expect conformity.

Consistency is a value in and of itself. Being able to agree on how things are generally done frees up mental space to focus on creating great product. That said, technical culture here is less a doctrine than a living document. Different engineers will have different feelings about PR best practices or how much testing should be done. While we have some overarching broad strokes that we try to reinforce, even that is ever-evolving because each person that joins the team brings something new.

6. We don’t evolve for the sake of evolving.

Though we take pride in our tech stack, we never want to focus all our innovation tokens on technological innovation. Anything we do is in service of pushing the long-term success of the business. When we bring in a new technology, it’s because of the impact it would have on our customers. We consider how well new tech integrates, how much lift it will give us, or what’s the cost of maintenance. We optimize globally, not locally. We’re always evolving, but never for the sake of evolving.

7. We don’t care who wins.

Conflict often happens from egos clashing and people wanting to be right. The theory of Energy Leadership identifies seven levels of energy in communication.

Level 1: “I lose.”

Level 2: “I win, you lose.”

Level 3: “I win, and if you win, I’m ok.”

Level 4: “You win, then I’ll win.”

Level 5: “We both win.”

Level 6: “The whole company wins.”

Level 7: “Winning and losing is an illusion.”

At the highest level of energy, winning and losing is an illusion. It shouldn’t matter who is right. There are 11 paths, and 9 of them are going to work out, so just pick one and go.

At Warmly, we prioritize a common scoreboard, rather than every department competing with each other. It doesn’t matter how many goals an individual scores if the team doesn’t win. We either all win or we don't win at all. The moment we start to think it’s Engineering versus Product, we’ve already lost.

8. We don’t avoid conflict. (i.e. You want TACOs, not NACHOs.)

Warmly came up with this acronym to describe our structure: Totally Aligned Committed Organization—TACO for short. Everyone needs to be emotionally bought into the success of the company and are not just clocking in and out. Part of that is creating a safe environment that allows questions and a healthy amount of pushback. This is especially important on an “A-player only” team where new engineers might be afraid to ask “Where’s this thing” or “How do I do that?” because nobody wants to be seen as incompetent. When you have a psychologically safe environment it allows for productive conflict, and only through conflict can you get to commitment. Then whatever decision is made, either individuals agree or they feel, “I may not agree with this decision, but I trust the process. I’ve said my piece, everything was considered. Let's give this a shot.”

9. We don’t let underperformance slide.

The other part of commitment is accountability. We make sure that there is clarity on the team goals. “What does success look like, what does failure look like, and what happens if we don’t hit success.” It might be, we try this new thing out and if we don’t see X result by this date, we take it out, or do Y. We put it in writing, publicly, so there’s no ambiguity when goals aren’t being hit. This way members of the team can hold themselves and one another accountable respectfully, while having high expectations for one another’s performance. When we’re worried about letting our teammates down, we’re more willing to step up our performance.

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If this sounds interesting to you, shoot me an email ([email protected]). I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Overview

As the leading Customer Success platform provider, Gainsight has employees all over the world, supporting customer-centric businesses with key business issues such as customer success, product experience, and revenue optimization to name a few. Their mission to help others build deep and lasting relationships and bring a human element back into this digital space resonates strongly with our own purpose.

Gainsight's customer facing teams realized the difficulties with developing trust and credibility as meetings increasingly shifted to Zoom. To combat these rising challenges, Gainsight introduced Warmly to its workforce and almost instantly saw positive results.

Inspiring confidence and trust

Presenting as a unified front is key to establishing yourself and team as qualified, knowledgeable professionals. Rather than showing up visually disjointed due to the mismatched backgrounds, Gainsight Admins synced all backgrounds with a click. External clients seemed more focused now they knew who they were speaking to rather than trying to match the names and titles to the faces.

Warmly removes background distractions and allows meeting hosts to set personalized shoutouts and display presentations over their shoulder. To fit brand standards, Gainsight used the Admin Portal to regulate the backgrounds and Nametag elements.

Reallocating time for action items

Instead of going through back and forth introductions and “how’s the weather” chatter, Gainsight's salespeople and solution architects had access to those details in their participants’ bios. Unlike 74% of other individuals, client-facing staff no longer needed to frantically sleuth the internet for Linkedin summaries and name pronunciation queries during the meeting.

With relevant information accessible at a glance, employees were able to reutilize those five minutes to dive deeper into action items and agenda topics, which shortened deal cycles by 15%.

"A Warmly Nametag in every meeting is a no brainer for any organization hoping to enhance its virtual meeting experience.Warmly helps Gainsight save thousands of hours a year on wasted introduction time."-Nick Mehta, CEO

Saving time with 90% less
pre-meeting prep

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Like many other companies, Gainsight's sales team spent several hours per week searching for information about who they're meeting with. Handling a large portfolio of clients can be difficult to remember details of a particular customer, especially when they've scheduled the initial or follow up call weeks ago. The team frequently had to refresh their memory by Googling or reviewing previous communications while balancing a packed schedule.

After enabling Calendar Signatures, Gainsight salespeople were able to easily access names, name pronunciations, job titles and location details all within the event invite as they leap into video calls. They were able to gather instant insights on their customers within their own calendar, reducing pre-meeting preparation time by 90% and reallocating the saved time to upselling current clients or securing new deals.

“Should I do an accelerator?” – almost every founder ever

Everyone asks me if they should even do an accelerator in the first place. If you’re a first-time founder, I will reply with an enthusiastic yes. As a company we've gone through them all: Techstars, Y-Combinator, Sequoia’s Company Design Program, and On Deck. They are a lot of work and by no means a magic bullet to unicorn-hood, but if you put in the effort, you will reap copious rewards.

“Should I do more than one accelerator?” – you, after reading the above paragraph

The answer is a clear and strong, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. We certainly don't regret it but it depends on your business model and what networks will be integral to your success. At Warmly, we think a lot about helping folks build stronger networks and deeper relationships (we're a free app that connects to your calendar to give you instant insights on people while you're meeting with them over Zoom).

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Y-Combinator vs Techstars

A question I get a lot from other founders is “Which one should I do – which one is better?”. As with every normative question, the answer is it depends. Depends on what you and your company are looking for.
Techstars is better at:

• Cohort camaraderie
• Providing work space
• Growing you as a leader and person
• Help pivoting and finding a real pain point
• Teaching the detailed operations bits on how to run a company
• Providing mentors who are responsive and invested in you
• Being open to new ideas and process improvements
• Access to B2B companies outside of Silicon Valley (Midwest & East Coast that trend more old school)

Y-Combinator is better at:

• Connecting you with a network of lots of unicorn founders
• Having a very active and helpful internal social network
• Fundraising – raising bigger rounds at higher valuations
• Opening doors due to brand recognition
• Pushing your business to hit aggressive revenue goals
• Investing in moonshots (wild and risky ideas that might be huge)
• Giving you tactical and succinct advice about a slew of very relevant topics such as GTM strategy
• Access to the almost any Silicon Valley startup and extension B2C growth advice

Let’s break it down

Cohort camaraderie

‍Winner: Techstars

‍Caveat: We did half of Techstars in person and half remote (COVID). We did all of YC remote.

Techstars Boulder

Techstars is a massive program with cohorts all over the world. We did the Techstars Boulder program, so I can really only speak to the experience there. I don’t know much about the other Techstars programs, although I suspect they are similar-ish.

• The Techstars Boulder program accepts 10 companies. With an average of 3-4 people per company, that’s about 30-40 people you get to know. Our Boulder Slack channel has 63 people in it, including program leadership.
• They hosted weekly bonding events where each week one team is responsible for planning something fun while we announce “wins”, “gratitudes”, “asks for help”, and who is “in the ditch”. Being in the ditch means you did something dumb like getting your GSuite suspended for your entire company for 24 hours so no one could send emails or open up a doc (yeah, I did that).
• 3-day offsite in the mountains packed with bonding and high quality, well run personal growth workshops (Not sure how they do this during COVID)
• Weekly CXO (CXO’s are any founder who’s not a CEO) and CEO forums where people gather and practice conflict resolution and work through emotional pains together. My cohort’s CEO and CXO forum is still going after the program! (Active during COVID)
• Swag on day 1 that everyone wears at the office (hat, hoodie, t-shirt, water bottle, stickers), it makes us all feel like more of a community.

Y-Combinator

• YC accepts ~200 companies. Our YC S20 Slack channel has 583 people in it, including program leadership. The 200 companies are broken up into roughly 5 groups. Our group has 110 people in the Slack channel. The groups then have sections of 5 companies each. Our section Slack has 15 people.
• Weekly dinners with half of the cohort
• During COVID this turned into a zoom call with a YC alum talking about their journey. I personally really enjoyed these speaker sessions and found them to be helpful to building a business. Downside is that there was no hangout time with other founders in the cohort.
• After dinners, founders typically hang around to chat together
• During COVID: Donut chats via Slack, otherwise no planned cohort bonding time. I enjoyed my Donut chats, although the response rate wasn’t great from other cohort members.
• Buy your own swag. Swag isn’t important to me and I think that because of COVID YC actually is sending us a swag pack, although they ran into some shipping issues (much like the rest of the world) and we still haven't gotten it.

Fundraising

Winner: YC

For their investor network, especially in a virtual world, it’s YC. We don’t have enough data on who is better at teaching how to fundraise since we weren’t raising during YC. And that, is a very important skill to learn.

Techstars Boulder

• Techstars has an extensive network of investors and a lot of background in B2B SaaS companies. We intended to pitch in front of 200+ investors in person in Boulder but because of COVID this turned virtual. The Demo Day with Techstars went well – check out our polished 4 min virtual presentation (yikes, so old! several pivots ago) that Techstars helped us prepare for extensively.
• Several of our Techstars mentors angel invested in us, as well as one VC firm Matchstick Ventures, a firm associated with Techstars. All of these were relationships we built in the program.
• Although the money we ended up taking didn’t come from inbound virtual Demo Day Techstars investors (~50 inbound), the video seemed to be quite helpful for the investors we ended up choosing. We have a hunch that we would have had more in-person investors had COVID not occurred.
• The very basis by which we learned how to fundraise, came from Techstars. David Cohen, the founder of Techstars, gives a seminal lecture to founders on essentially “How to convince most investors to ask to invest in you.” It’s legendary.
• Techstars provided the following fundraising help: (1) Multiple pitch-practice sessions in internally (2) 2 pitch-practice sessions externally live with real investors (great to get real investor feedback!), (3) Warm intros to ~10 top requested investors from their internal list
• Techstars’ internal data on investors from their Techstars Connect portal was not very helpful.

Y-Combinator

• YC has an incredibly strong brand name amongst investors in the Valley. With companies like Stripe, Airbnb, DoorDash, Coinbase, Instacart, Ginkgo Bioworks, Gusto, Reddit, and more coming out of YC, that shouldn’t be surprising. Investors want in on YC companies and the average valuation of a YC startup is substantially higher than a Techstars startup. YC is like a feeder high school to the ivy league investors.
• In YC in June we were getting ~2 inbound investors requests per day (this increased to 4 per day after we publicly announced our Seed Round in Forbes).
• YC provides “Fundraising Office Hours” and helps prepping for and demoing on Demo Day. The partners are quite responsive. Caveat: this is hearsay from founder friends since we skipped Demo Day as we didn’t need to fundraise
• YC Demo Day was virtual and participants were allowed a single slide (!) and 1-minute (!) to explain their company to watching investors. We actually really appreciated this simplicity vs the traditional lengthy slide deck.

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Grow as a person and leader

Winner: Techstars

Techstars Boulder

• Techstars invests in your brain and well-being. I already mentioned the emotional support CXO/CEO groups, which are lead by a mental health pro, who is in the office everyday for 1:1 chats at any time. Our pro was Keith Gruen, who just launched his own YouTube channel.
• Additionally, they provide you a free leadership coach that you meet with weekly. My coach was instrumental in helping me work through and gain the skills to manage some the really challenging things I went through during the program. In addition to this, a lot of their curriculum is structured around being a better team leader, in addition to tactical business building advice.

Y-Combinator

• No mental health support or leadership coaching that I’m aware of. Maybe there is one, but it wasn’t made known to me nor did I proactively ask for one. However, you search for “mental health” in Bookface (YC’s internal social network), you find a good number of posts where founders are speaking honestly to each other about this sort of thing.

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Internal social network

Winner: YC

Techstars Boulder

• Techstars has an extensive internal network that thousands of people are on. It’s pretty good and has tons of resources to help founders build a company.
• There’s an ad hoc mailing list that people can reach out to when relevant (it’s call Amplify). The rule of thumb is that for every Amplify request you have, you get 10 people with theirs. They are usually akin to “help like/share/comment on my new launch”.

Y-Combinator

• Because YC is a smaller community, bonds are stronger and the internal network (Bookface) is much more active and reliable than Techstars’ internal network. Almost every post has several replies and people are eager to help with all sorts of professional and personal favors. For example I was looking for roommates for my place in Hawaii and I posted on Bookface instead of Techstars Connect because the smaller community felt more personal and has an established norm of not always being only about business.
• YC has a daily digest emailed to you of the most poppin’ posts of yesterday.

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Help pivoting and finding a true pain point

Winner: Techstars

Techstars Boulder

• We got into Techstars with an MVP for a mobile app for professional networking. By the time we started Techstars we learned that this idea wasn’t going to take us anywhere so we pivoted to PushPull. Week 2 of Techstars has a thing called Mentor Madness, where you pitch your idea to 80+ mentors. After the crazy two weeks of Mentor Madness, you choose 4-6 longer term mentors who help you throughout the program and beyond. The Madness weeks are grueling but incredibly enlightening. We pitched our PushPull idea and got expert feedback on the reality of building a business like this. We met with our chosen mentors weekly and got incredible insights that would have taken us a very long time to get ourselves. Because of Mentor Madness we ended up pivoting and finding a pain point that got us real paying customers by the end of the program. We wrote our first line of code in the middle of March and, by the end of April, showed up to Demo Day with 19 customers and raised $2M+. This was only possible because of the insights we got.
• We had also had a Weekly Ops Review with Techstars, and this had a very clear and effective structure to discuss our business goals and how well we did on the goals from last week. Everyone made a slide deck using the template and had 5 minutes to share their updates. At the end there would be a brief Q&A where other founders would comment and typically ask insightful & helpful questions.

Y-Combinator

• By the time we started YC, we knew what we were building, or so we thought. Our idea seemed good enough and we were never really challenged on it. We had traction and a tiny amount of revenue after all. Because of this, we didn’t proactively ask for help on figuring out a pain point. That being said, I spoke to a few founders (via Donut chats) who were in the very early stages (like what we were in at the start of Techstars) and they said they still felt really lost and like they weren’t getting the help or support in finding a pain point.
• With YC you have a weekly check-in meeting. Every week it alternates between a group (5 companies) check-in with your YC Partner and one without the partner. The goal of those meetings is to check in on how you did last week and what you want to do this week. Those meetings didn’t have strong structure and overall didn’t feel very productive or helpful. The ones without the Partner were truly unstructured, albeit, a nice social time.

Investing in moonshots & wild ideas

Winner: YC

Techstars Boulder

• Techstars leans more heavily towards companies with proven business models and it seems to take less risks on wild ideas.

Y-Combinator

• YC seems to have a much higher risk tolerance and so do the founders they accept. YC casts their net wide with a cohort of 500+ people and accepts in competitive companies (there were at least 3 Zoom competitors in our batch) and relatively high-risk (compared to SaaS) biotech or hardware companies. The average YC founder comes from the tech scene already, so they are primed to be extraordinarily scrappy and have bold visions. YC founders are also much younger on average, and don’t have families or mortgages, so they are willing to lose it all.

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Office Space

Winner: Techstars

Techstars Boulder

• Free office space where 10 companies work and laugh together
• Not available during COVID, obviously

Y-Combinator

• No office space, although I think not during COVID the YC HQ has couches and hangout areas for socializing after the weekly dinners.

Help getting media mentions

Winner: YC

Techstars Boulder

• Their press announcement led to a few more article mentions (google "techstars boulder class of 2020 colorado")
• Techstars gave us 120 personal intros to customers in Techstars Network
• They tweeted/facebooked our Forbes seed round announcement

Y-Combinator

• Getting media and PR may seem like a “nice to have”, but trust me, it’s key. Proper marketing, especially in a saturated market like sales enablement tools (our startup) can make or break an aspiring unicorn.
• They have a partner devoted to press and PR (Kat Manalac) and she spent time with us reviewing and offering suggestions for our press release that was very helpful in our pitch to multiple outlets. Though their connections to TechCrunch declined to profile us <sad violin music plays>, Kat's wordsmithing was critical towards getting Forbes excited about us (the Forbes intro came through our investors).
• Our Bookface post (internal YC network) was read by 1000+ and led to multiple customers
• They tweeted/facebooked our Forbes seed round announcement

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En Conclusión

Ultimately the choice is yours. But if you're drowning in decision paralysis then one way to think about it is as a mindset:

• If you are a baby bird that just hatched out of your cushy and stable 9-5 job and know little of the world of entrepreneurship, go for the program that will support you more (Techstars)
• If you are an older bird who knows what they are doing but just needs more access, go for the better brand recognition program (YC)

And while picking an accelerator is important, the reality is if your business sucks then neither accelerator will make you a unicorn.

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May the odds be ever in your favor,

Val

Cofounder @ Warmly
YC S20 & Techstars Boulder '20

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Oh yeah, and who are we?

Warmly is a free app that helps you create deeper relationships with the people who matter most. By simply connecting your calendar, Warmly gives you instant insights & context on everyone you meet, directly in Zoom & Google Hangouts.

As explained in prior articles we are going through a sales and marketing evolution. Buyers are moving faster than ever. Sales teams can use slack to stay ahead of the competition.

One way to achieve this is through effective communication and immediate action on leads. Today, many leading companies, including Hubspot, Drift, Stripe, AllSend, Webflow, and Salesforce-acquired Troops.ai, are leveraging the potential of Slack to enhance their sales communications. They send instantaneous notifications to their sales reps via Slack, keeping their teams alert and responsive. Especially when the average digital attention span is eight seconds, you want to immediately respond to buyer interest.

Essential Role of Slack Notifications in Revenue Operations

For revops teams, creating a system for your salespeople with relevant Slack notifications is no longer optional - it’s essential. If you’re not using this strategy, you’re missing a crucial opportunity. Using tools like Zapier, you can create low-code alerts for just about anything into Slack, a platform where your reps already live and work. The aim is to drive immediate action, keeping your team responsive and agile.

Sample automated email from an inbound request to Warmly. The rest of the Slack message includes meta information like email, how they heard about us, and why did they decide to book with us.

The One-Channel Strategy

Some businesses prefer to channel all their alerts to one communal Slack channel. This strategy generates a sense of urgency and competition, as every member can see and respond to the same alerts. After taking action on an alert - say, someone visited your website or opened a sales collateral - reps mark the notification with a check, indicating it’s been handled. For instance, we use the #f-sales channel to sync on every sales process, including mistakes, customer successes, and lessons that we can learn.

The Individual Channel Strategy

Alternatively, some companies create individual channels for each rep. In this setup, the rep’s manager or supervisor is included in the channel to ensure accountability. As an example team, our growth team has two to three members officially in charge of tasks, but we’re keen on bringing everyone into the loop, so we’ll post weekly and bi-weekly updates, either in the form of long-form digests or links to projects, to share the learnings. Even though the individual channels focus on the messages of two members, the wider community is involved in the reply and comment sections.

Types of Slack Notifications for Sales

From top-of-the-funnel interactions to greenfield accounts, there’s a wide array of potential alerts for your sales team:

1. Top of Funnel Interactions: If someone opens your email, that’s an ideal moment for a cold call, so why not set a Slack alert for this?
2. Meeting Requests: When someone wants to set up a meeting, a timely Slack alert can streamline the scheduling process.
3. Active Deals: Keep your team updated on any significant activity on active deals with real-time Slack alerts.
4. Account Visits: When a potential lead or customer visits your website, an immediate Slack alert allows your team to quickly follow up.
5. Inbound Form Fills: Instant alerts, whenever someone fills a form to request a demo, can help your team respond promptly.
6. Greenfield Accounts: These are companies visiting your website that are not yet in your CRM. If they’re within your ICP, this might be a great opportunity to reach out.

You can also differentiate your Slack notifications by priority level, with distinct alerts for high-priority and less important tasks. This strategy can help your team manage their time and focus more effectively.

Crafting a Sensible Slack Notification System Using Warmly

Creating an effective notification system on Slack requires a thoughtful approach. The goal is to design a set of notifications and channels that make sense for your team’s structure and workflow. At Warmly, we adopt the following channels to streamline our processes:

• #a-inbound-request: Prospect booked a demo
• #a-warmly-for-free: Prospect is trying our free version
• #a-inbound-pounce-response: Prospect responded to an outbound AI chat message on our website
• #a-identified-user: Prospect is identified on our website
• #a-identified-company: Target company is identified and active on our website
• #a-[AE name]-accounts: Target accounts owned by the AE is active on the website

Balancing the Use of Slack Notifications

While Slack notifications can be incredibly useful, it’s also important not to over-rely on them. Too many notifications can create a sense of constant urgency that might result in more noise than signal. Consider using Slack for real-time, actionable items that need to be addressed within the day. Other less time-sensitive information might be better suited to a daily email or dashboard.

Remember that it’s okay to mute a Slack channel unless you’re being directly messaged. This way, you’re only getting notifications for leads that you need to take action on, rather than getting drowned in information about your coworkers’ leads. Be willing to experiment with the number and frequency of notifications, and adjust them to find a balance that keeps your team responsive without overwhelming them.

Celebrating Success on Slack

Finally, remember that Slack is not just for tasks and alerts; it’s also a fantastic tool for celebrating success. Use it to create a positive work culture by celebrating wins, big or small. This practice not only boosts morale but also encourages further success.

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Slack notifications are powerful tools in the arsenal of any sales team. Used wisely, they can significantly improve the speed and effectiveness of your team’s communication, helping you to stay ahead in the competitive world of sales.

Warmly Secures $11M Series A to scale its AI fueled pipeline acceleration platform for SMBs 

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Delivers ready to convert prospects increasing pipeline by +200% in the first 3 months

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San Francisco, CA - October 19, 2023 - Warmly, the first AI fueled pipeline acceleration platform that harnesses the power of existing sales enablement and intent tools to automatically deliver ready to convert prospects to sales, announced an $11M Series A round led by Felicis, NFX, Zoom, F-Prime Capital, Maven Ventures and others. The Warmly platform orchestrates metadata from Salesforce, Hubspot, Slack, Outreach & Salesloft and combines them with intent data from 6sense, Clearbit and Bombora to identify, track, and connect with website visitors who are in active buy mode. This allows teams to prioritize the deals most likely to close. Warmly is purpose built to meet the growth targets and budgets of small and medium (SMB) sized B2B companies. Early adopters include New Relic, Zoom, Seamless.ai, and Sendoso.

“Organizations spend more than $47 billion each year to drive prospects to their websites, yet 97% of visitors never fill out a form or share their information,” said Warmly cofounder Carina Boo, “The ability to engage with these prospects in real-time, while they are actively researching on your site fast-tracks time to purchase, and that’s what sales reps need,” said Boo.

SMBs are struggling

99% of organizations are SMBs. In this climate of layoffs, global financial pressures and budget cuts, companies of all sizes have fewer in-bound leads while needing more ‘at-bats’ to meet growing quotas. Large organizations can often hire more staff or buy expensive enterprise grade solutions to help. The Warmly Platform was purpose-built to automate and orchestrate the sales tech stack for SMBs, and deliver ready to convert prospects. Warmly clients have seen: 

• ROI - Namecoach got 282% ROI in 6 months while Behavioral Signals doubled their enterprise pipeline in 30 days
• Fast results - Kanji booked two qualified new business meetings with minutes of installation 

“We were running multiple campaigns and weren’t seeing the results we wanted,” said Jay Leano, VP Sales, Behavioral Signals. Within the first month of using Warmly we were able to double our enterprise pipeline with outbound campaigns that converted quickly on our site.”

According to Gartner, most prospects require on average 20 touches to convert to a trial or a meeting. And cold outbound conversion rates have plummeted as buyers are now inundated with sales outreach. Warmly cuts to the chase, enabling sales to start a warmer conversation with prospects directly, at the exact moment they are actively researching.  

“The reason to buy Warmly is to deliver more new business meetings to your reps,” said Jonathan Pogact, VP Marketing, Seamless.ai. “Knowing that someone who has engaged with our content and emails before is back again, and being able to engage with them in real-time, ensures our sales reps have higher rates of conversion. This solution is critical for any business that runs on inbound marketing and SDRs,” said Pogact.

“The average digital attention span is 8 seconds, according to media analysts and data scientists,” says Aydin Senkut, Warmly Series A investor, Founder and Managing Partner at Felicis. “So the opportunity to catch a prospect while they are actively engaged with your content is fleeting. There is no time to chat the visitor, upload a lead into a CRM, enrich the data, and add to a follow up sequence. Warmly provides real-time orchestration of these tasks within that 8-second window.”

How Warmly works: Simple, automated orchestration with easy installation:

• Warmly identifies anonymous traffic and associates the ‘suspects’ to opportunities and target accounts in the CRM
• Accounts are scored based on intent signals from website, CRM, Outreach, SalesLoft, 6sense and Bombora
• High propensity to convert prospects visiting the site are served to sales reps instantly so they can engage and greet ideal prospects via AI chatbot real-time
• If the AI Chabot is not able to secure a meeting, then Warmly automatically finds the decision makers of hot accounts and sends personalized messages on behalf of the sales reps via email and LinkedIn

By automatically aggregating data and integrating insights from various platforms, Warmly identifies which accounts to prioritize, the stage of the buyer journey, and orchestrates the most effective next step to drive trials and meetings.

“Many of the newer sales tools and strategies work in silos to solve one piece of the sales funnel challenge," explained James Currier, General Partner of NFX. "Warmly's AI driven approach and automated orchestration of these tools enables sales teams to convert leads faster.”

“Organizations still struggle with how to increase sales productivity,” explained Max Greenwald, CEO of Warmly. “The promise of AI is not to replace humans, it’s to enable humans to be more effective and deliver more with the same or less. Warmly has the first solution that does this today. With this new capital we will bring the vision of autonomous sales orchestration. By shifting from automation to autonomy, we can empower sales teams to navigate complex processes on autopilot and serve prospects more dynamically.”

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About Warmly

Founded in 2020 by Ex-Google and Forbes 30 under 30 honorees, Warmly is the first AI fueled pipeline acceleration platform that harnesses the power of existing sales enablement and intent tools to automatically identify high propensity website visitors and alert them to sales for real-time engagement. It’s the first such solution purpose built to meet the business and budget needs of SMBs.

Based in San Francisco, Warmly investors include Felicis, NFX, Zoom, F-Prime Capital, Maven Ventures, Soma Capital, YC and others. The company has grown 30% month-over-month during the last year. 

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About Felicis

Founded in 2006, Felicis is a venture capital firm investing in companies reinventing core markets, as well as those creating frontier technologies. Felicis focuses on early-stage investments and currently manages over $3B in capital across 9 funds. The firm is an early backer of more than 47 companies valued at $1B+. More than 100 of its portfolio companies have been acquired or gone public, including Adyen (IPO), Credit Karma (acq by Intuit), Cruise (acquired by General Motors), Fitbit (IPO), Guardant Health (IPO), Meraki (acq by Cisco), Ring (acq by Amazon), and Shopify (IPO). The firm is based in Menlo Park and San Francisco in California. Learn more at www.felicis.com.

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About NFX

NFX is the world’s largest venture firm dedicated exclusively to pre-seed and seed stage companies. The firm is based in San Francisco, CA and Herzlia, Israel, and invests in network-effects driven startups. Founded by entrepreneurs who built 10 companies with more than $10 billion in exits across multiple industries and regions, NFX is transforming how true innovators are funded. Learn more at www.nfx.com.