When people who haven't heard of us before read the press about our fundraise they assume that success is a straight line. It wasn't.

Those who are close to us know that progress was not linear. We pivoted four times before landing on the current iteration of our business, so we've learned a couple of things that didn't work before we found one that did.

See Max's LinkedIn post about our various pivots.

We want to share an unconventional framework for early startups that worked for us as we were navigating the idea maze.

Step 1: Assemble An Anti-Fragile Founding Team

The cofounders, Carina, Max, and myself were lucky enough to have met each other when we did to start this company.

Max and Carina met at Google, launching a "Where's Waldo" April Fools prank inside of Google Maps.

Max and I met through a founders fellowship program called On Deck (which I highly recommend for any early stage founder to apply).

Although we all shared a common goal and vision, we had very different styles and ways of thinking to achieve that goal - just ask any of our employees.

Over time, our unique approaches complemented each other and extended our strengths.

The archetype of each of Warmly's founder might look something like...

Max is our legendary purple cow.

Dreams big. Stands out. Reaches for the unreachable. Hustler.

Max is someone who, when you meet, you won't forget. He's a compelling character who can turn noes into yeses.

Top tier investors. Enterprise companies. The best talent in the market.

Eventually, they all cave.

He goes where nobody goes and thinks unconventionally.

For example, when Max takes a stroll, he'll sometimes select random numbers to call just to say "hi" and catch up for two minutes. It keeps the network warm and Max updated on where people are at and what they need.

This is a mindset you can't teach.

Carina is our methodical empire builder.

Filters out noise. Weights every decision. Leaves nothing to chance. Turns ideas into reality.

Carina is someone who has diagrams and graphics for everything. She is a systems thinker who has no problems calling your bull$&!+. She's the perfect complement for Max's creative energy and ideas.

Carina, although smiley by nature, is unemotional when it comes to decision-making, has the least bias out of the founders, and actively solicits everyone's opinion.

When the "processing period" has concluded, you won't look at the final proposal and think "that doesn't make sense."

It always makes sense.

Alan is our scrappy explorer

Curious. Dives headfirst. Always seeking the next big opportunity.

I started off in engineering at Warmly but have moved around a bit to sales, customer success, and now marketing.

To be honest I'm not detail-oriented enough to execute to perfection like Carina, or have the same relentless creativity that can pull rabbits out of the hat for the company like Max.

What gets me fired up is identifying and solving big bottlenecks in the company. And it's allowed me to learn how to pick new things up quickly.

Once the founders understood each other better we gravitated into roles that extended our zones of genius.

The wholeness in how we operated meant that with each pivot we learned more about product, market, and ourselves. We became anti-fragile, and by extension so did our company.

Eventually, after 4-years, the score takes care of itself.

Step 2: Leave Your Ego At The Door

Initially, we were naive enough to think that our ideas would be the ones to shape the world.

"Just imagine if we could build a better LinkedIn where people listed their asks and offers like in On Deck's slack channel."

Our first product, pushpull, connects people authentically to help each other out.

Source: pushpull.community

“You were so preoccupied with whether or not you could, you didn't stop to think if you should” - Jurassic Park

We didn't ask ourselves "If this idea was so good why hasn't it become a billion dollar company yet?"

There was no big favor marketplace.

We were trying to be the first.

And in doing so, we understood why many failed before us.

"How much money were people saving or making by doing this?"

Unclear.

We couldn't charge anything for the product.

We moved on to our next pivot, job change tracking for sales teams, where we started asking for money up-front.

That worked well until we realized we couldn't scale the product, another prerequisite for large VC backed company.

We went through a few more pivots, each one teaching us a new way to kill our ego.

To spare you the details, here are a couple more lessons:

• Acknowledging that we didn't have all the answers allowed us to seek external advice and shortcut our path to learnings. Nowadays we speak with founders of failed startups, former employees of competitors, investors in our space, anybody who could help diversify our perspectives
• Focusing on learnings rather than the satisfaction of being right ultimately led us to cut losing and embrace winning ideas. It's not enough to make revenue, we needed a path towards making one hundred million in revenue.
• Adaptibility became our superpower. A shortcut to building what other people wanted was learning the art of copying. Elon musk figured out that a lot of people in the world liked driving things with four wheels and a steering wheel. And there were already a bunch of roads out there. Why not re-create that (car) but just change one thing (battery)? Stand on top of the shoulder of giants.

Step 3: Stay as close as you can to the market

We did everything we could to stay close to the market.

At first we talked to prospects, customers, investors, competitors, former employees of competitors.

We even became a full-time SDR at another company to live and breathe the role.

We did in-depth interviews with our ICP buyers using tools like user interviews.

We studied competitor ads, websites, products, reviews and testimonials to see what people were saying.

We listened to sales and marketing podcasts daily to see the current issues and how people were resolving them.

We kept our eyes and ears peeled for any new entrants.

We contracted with former competitor employees to learn best practices.

We engaged in sales and marketing communities.

We posted on social frequently about our thoughts on the space to see how on the mark we were.

We ran language tests on landing pages with our ICP using tools like wynter.

We started co-hosting sales and marketing webinars.

Eventually, we became sharp about the market and how we could build something that was not only better, but new.

Step 4: Run toward your vision

Goals should be as clear as they are ambitious. When we knew the outcome we wanted and why we wanted it, we made the most progress as a company.

From there, it's a battle against time and distraction. Every second counts. Anything has the potential to take your mind away from the real north star.

Sales people will understand this: nothing matters but the revenue you bring.

You connected with 100 people on LinkedIn, sent 50 personalized emails, responded to all your internal slacks. But did you close any deals?

It's easy to get lost in "tasks." If we're not careful, the things we end up doing (or are asked to do) don't move the needle. Days start to melt. A month might go by and a lot was done on paper but it doens't feel like what James Currier, General Partner of NFX, would call "fast moving waters."

In the words of our General Manager of Nametags, Alessandro Cetera, "Sometimes it felt like we were swimming, but not moving."

We needed to maximize the impact of every second of the day.

It required a shift in thinking.

Say no to everything, except the things that matter.

Someone wanted to meet for 30 minutes for advice?

"Sorry, slammed right now."

Someone at Warmly wanted to introduce me to a potential partner?

"After Q4, thanks."

Manager is recommending a cool idea we could do?

"Interesting idea. Thanks for sharing."

Our head of Sales, Keegan Otter, does a fantastic job of protecting his time and mind. He says no to just about everything, and he does it all with a smile :). He works days, nights, and weekends - doesn't let a second go to waste.

And you know what happened? He doubled revenue for Warmly within months of joining and he's just getting started.

Words are cheap. Results speak louder than any pitch deck.

Doing something that sounds good is beside the point. Proving that you were right when it matters, consistently, especially when the decision was controversial was what maneuvered us into the "fast-moving waters."

It might seem chaotic from the outside to investors, friends, and even employees because you have trouble explaining how your mind is working. It's not useful towards your goal that everyone understood you perfectly. Your thinking is recalibrating every day anyways to new information.

On the inside, the picture gets clearer every day as you're trying new things, refining mental models, and building off of these "truth blocks" until your vision becomes not only clear, but obvious.

You realize that you actually have everything you need to make this a reality.

Suddenly the language you start to use with customers sounds like music. Their eyes light up when you show them your demo.

Everything downstream becomes easier once you've pivoted into something that was proved, iteratively, from first principles.

Sales come easier. Marketing comes more naturally. Product and engineering know what to build and can see the impact of their work with customers.

The whole company becomes 100% mission-aligned.

The funny thing about frameworks is that they tend to be backward looking mechanisms to explain to others how you think you got to where you did.

But every product, person, customer, and market environment is different.

We created Zoom Nametags during COVID, and now an AI sales platform during a tech downturn.

We may need to scrap it all and pivot again one day. Can't say how we'd do it. But now that we've done it once, after so many failed attempts, we're 100% confident of what it takes for us to do it again.

Hi World,

I’m Max, CEO of Warmly, a startup going through Y-Combinator’s Summer 2020 batch. For those unfamiliar, Y-Combinator (or YC for short) is a startup accelerator. Thanks to YC, our startup alongside over 200 others will learn, grow and accelerate over the course of the next 12 weeks. Curious about what goes on at YC and what a startup can learn from the process? My co-founders and I plan to blog about our experience to give you the inside look at the program and help us reflect on what will be a whirlwind experience!

So who the heck are we? Well, the Warmly cofounding team is made up of Val, Carina, Alan and me (Max). We’re a motley crew and sometimes in quarantine we make rap songs.

You might notice that above I hyper-linked something strange called a PushPull card instead of traditional LinkedIn profiles. That’s because in our first attempt at a startup we built authentic actionable business cards. But after going through another incredible accelerator this winter called Techstars (in Boulder, Colorado), we pivoted to Warmly.

What the heck does Warmly do? Warmly builds software that helps B2B companies get more customers easily. Our first product, TrackAdvocates, tracks the job changes of a business’ customer contacts and provides the tools to reconnect and generate new sales. This allows them to resell their software to users who already love them.

But back to the humans behind the business. Over the coming weeks, each of the cofounders will be writing up their honest thoughts and reflections on going through YC and what we’re learning. While it is mostly for us to process all the goodness we hope to come from the summer, we hope you’ll find it interesting too. So anyways, let’s start with Week 1:

YC Bootcamp. YC started off with a bang with a bunch of back to back Zoom sessions all week in what they call “Bootcamp”. Because of COVID, everything is remote. The sessions in Bootcamp are designed to give us a variety of topics to think about — from the best growth metrics to track, to product development cycles, to enterprise sales advice to how to write good emails, it was certainly a whirlwind.

One highlight was certainly hearing the Airbnb founders tell their origin story — I really respect them. They started exactly where I am now, in Y-Combinator. And their determination through the program led them to be “ramen-profitable” or making enough money to cover rent and basic food for the cofounders. As I watched them so at ease with one another telling their story by passing the speaking baton between each of the three, it was so clear how close they were to one another and how much they trusted one another. I felt grateful to share that amongst my cofounders.

Armed with 20+ pages of notes, my cofounders and I had a lot to digest and dozens of action items to implement with our startup. Personally I felt stressed and anxious. Starting a company is hard. Really hard. And we have a long way to go to be successful. I posted about my stress in the YC Slack group and was comforted to have a lot of support from other founders feeling similarly!

Want to get in touch or send thoughts about our posts? No problem — would love to hear them at [email protected]

P.S. if you want a way to to invest/support startups and small businesses like ours you can use Wefunder.

Hello! I’m Carina, Cofounder & Head of Product at Warmly. A few months ago, I left my beloved Google Maps family of 4 years to start a company with three amazing humans, Max, Alan, and Val. Since then, we’ve launched our first product PushPull, pivoted off that product (now available as a free platform 😊), launched our new product Warmly and got our first customers.

Two weeks ago we joined Y Combinator Summer 2020 batch (first remote batch because of COVID-19). For those who haven’t heard, Y Combinator (YC for short) is a 3-month startup accelerator program, which many companies in the Silicon Valley have gone through in their early days, e.g. Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox, Coinbase, Instacart, Doordash, Segment, Docker. YC provides you with mentors and a network of alumni and other founders to accelerate your learning, growth, and traction — and hopefully prevent you from making similar mistakes as other first-time founders might.

What happened in Week 2 of Y Combinator?

YC is actually a lot less structured than you might expect. Generally, there’s 1.5 hour of sessions every Tuesday and Thursday. This week they covered finding product market fit and our YC partners/mentors Eric Migicovsky (ex-Founder of Pebble smartwatch) and Gustaf Alströmer (ex-Product Lead at Airbnb) shared their founder stories. They have pretty wild stories — we can’t share the actual talk, but here’s snippets public on YouTube we can share: Eric (YC 2011) talks about his Pebble Smartwatch Founder Story, and Gustaf (YC 2007) doesn’t have his founder story public, but he has an awesome How to Get Users & Grow talk, pulling from real examples from his Airbnb experience!

We also went through something they call Prototype Day, where each startup gets a few minutes to mock-pitch, in preparation for pitching to investors on Demo Day in August.

3 key points you want to get across in minutes:

1. What do you do? In 1 line! Just enough for the listener to be able to picture what it is your product does and be hooked into wanting to know more.
2. Why do users care? Show why the market size is huge. Show you have user traction.
3. Why is your team the one to do this? Why is your team amazing? Do you have founder-market fit and the right skillset?

You want people to remember you and what you do. Note that there’s 200+ startups in each YC batch. Investors will be listening to these back to back!

For example, our ‘What do you do’ 1-liner is:

“Warmly gives you weekly warm intros to warm leads for any B2B Company. When you sync your CRM with our software we monitor the job changes of all your users and let you know which companies they’ve gone to next so you can sell into new companies through people who already love your product.”

We also started with a funky team bio to help us be memorable. 😛

“Hi I’m Max and my co-founders are awesome. In their free time Carina is a chicken farmer 🐓, Val is a circus aerialist ️🤸‍ ️& Alan is a wushu master 🥋. I’m just the guy who convinced them to leave Google with me to start Warmly.”

Besides these sessions, there’s 2 office hours to discuss whatever you need help with. One with your group-mates (about 5 startups per group). One with just your team and a YC partner.

The rest of the week, it’s up to you to make the most out of it! Our team has been rapidly focusing on growth: getting more users, talking to users, improving new user experience, scaling the backend to support all the incoming new users, and hashing out clearer metrics to measure growth.

A realization: CEOs & founders are human too 💡

As I heard founder stories from Airbnb founders (YC 2009), from the Pebble founder, and other YC 2020 batchmates, I realized that all of them were in our shoes when they first started.

I remember when I was in college at UC Berkeley doing Computer Science. Getting a Software Engineering job at Google seemed like a far-off dream job. I remember I didn’t even apply to Google because I legitimately didn’t think I’d get in.

When I was at Google, every time I bumped into a VP or Exec, I definitely felt like they were levels above me — I wouldn’t even know what to say to them. And I remember reading news about the CEO of Facebook, the CEO of Uber, and seeing them as superhuman.

It wasn’t until we started fundraising that it really hit me. As part of reference checking our investors & VC firms, we chatted with some of the founders who those investors were funding. We met some famous CEOs. And they were just incredibly nice, humble, human beings. They also had struggles. They also had to go through rounds of failures and learnings. Same with the now-famous founders who came to YC to tell us their founder story and give us advice. The key things that made the difference was they made the leap to start a startup, and they constantly learned from others to get better, and they didn’t give up but instead pushed through all the challenges they faced.

You can do it too. :)

Bonus realization: I realized that all cofounders and first employees do a TON to get a startup to where it is today. Usually only the CEO is known (think Mark Zuckerberg, Travis Kalanick, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs). But going through a startup now and talking to other founders, I have mad respect for all cofounders. And I’m super grateful to have an amazingly quirky, smart, caring, driven hustlers whom I call cofounders.

A few asks: Product Feedback, Intros, and Sales Advice 🙏

Feedback on Warmly: If you have experience working in B2B in the Sales, Customer Success, or Marketing realm, we’d love to show you our product and get feedback on whether it’s intuitive and get ideas on how we can improve it!

Intros to potential users: If you know anyone in a company who might want to use our product, let us know! Even if they can’t currently buy our product, just giving us feedback on our product idea or trialing our product is extremely helpful! Ideally if you know a Chief Revenue Officer (or someone in Sales or Customer Success), that would be great — these are our ideal users. But intros to a good friend in any role who works at a B2B/Enterprise company works! (We can reach out to them to see if they can intro us to someone in Sales or Customer Success. 😊)

Advice on sales: None of the 4 cofounders have sales backgrounds, although we’re pretty good at being sponges and learning from smart people and putting things to practice. We could use advice on how to source leads, prioritize and nurture them, close deals, etc. Thanks so much to Eric Davis, Scott Leese, and our talented Techstars and YC mentors who’ve helped us a ton so far!

What happened in Week 1 of Y Combinator?

Check out my cofounder Max Greenwald’s post Week 1 in Y Combinator.

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

Here are three assumptions we had invalidated by YC.

Hello! My name is Val and I’m a co-founder & CPO at Warmly. My fellow founding musketeers (Alan, Carina, Max) and I are going through YCombinator this summer.

*****

Something YC does really well is accumulating thousands of data points about startup activity. When they give opinions on what you should be doing, it is usually based on the experiences of scores, if not hundreds, of companies before you.

Here are three assumptions we had invalidated by YC.

1. “Our pricing matters”

We came to our partner meeting with a question of “how should we be pricing” and the answer was a literal ‘LOL’.

Pricing is irrelevant at our stage. Choose something decent and go with it, it’s a colossal waste of time to try to optimize pricing while our user base is in the double-digits and our monthly revenue is the quadruple-digits. Our primary focus is now purely on getting paying customers at the price point we have.

2. “We need to anticipate backend errors and have robust code that is unlikely to break”

As a team of mostly former Googlers, we are the Queens and Kings of optimization. We know how to take something that’s decent and make it awesome. In a startup, however, you need to take something that’s nothing and make it decent. For a crew of Type-A overachievers, making something “decent” can be extraordinarily painful.

We learned to not try to optimize our product. We are not Google. Startups need to take giant swings and then see if they work. Don’t bother fixing code unless it’s breakage is impacting your ability to get more sales and keep churn low. If customers are tolerating a suboptimal experience, great. Don’t touch it. Work on what is preventing new sales or what is going to make people quit your product in the next two months. Don’t plan features further out than that. Why? Because being slow to launch = delays in getting user feedback = less understanding of users and the problem = you’re slow to iterate solution = startup death.

As a former designer, I had to learn to be content with a “not atrociously terrible” UX. It wasn’t easy. Our YC partners, Gustaf and Eric, really drove home the idea that “if people aren’t complaining, then you’re wasting your time fixing it”. Focusing on “delightful” UX is a luxury for businesses more developed than ours.

3. “A lost sale is a failure”

If a prospect didn’t want our product it’s a “gosh darn it, well better luck next time”.

NO. If a prospect didn’t want your product, document exactly what it was about them that made them a bad fit. Track this. Celebrate disqualifying certain demographics because that helps you narrow in on your actual ideal customer.

If you do this documentation and still feel like the prospect would have benefited from your product, then you’re a crap salesperson and you need to get better. Record your sales calls. There is nothing quite as cringy as watching a recording of yourself, do it. You’ll catch all of your “likes” and see how terrible it is when you don’t make “eye-contact” with the person on Zoom.

Gross salesguy/dad from Matilda, my favorite childhood movie. I literally used to try to make things move with my mind. It never worked. :(

What happened in Week 2 of Y Combinator?

Check out my cofounder Carina Boo’s post Week 2 in Y Combinator.

Hey all! I’m Alan, co-founder & VP of Engineering at Warmly.

My co-founder Val mentioned in our last post “Three Things YC has changed our minds on”, that moving too slowly can lead to startup death. Another way to think about it is that you aren’t moving fast enough if things aren’t breaking. See, if a startup had 100 days of runway to make something happen, shipping features every 10 days means it only has 10 bets to make on the market. But the truth is nobody knows the odds of success for each bet. The only thing we can control is the number of bets we take. For a small team like ours, up against well-funded startups and entrenched incumbents, speed is our only advantage.

During our most recent YC office hours, YC’s advice to us was very simple: aggressively pursue growth. As a team we’ve always tried to move fast. But this week we dialed it up a bit.

We launched Warmly across YC’s internal network and its “B2B Preview Day” and saw an 11x spike in inbound interest from customers in 2 days. It was kind of a shock to the system. On the business side we were underwater with customer calls, sales-demos, and follow-ups, in addition to managing existing users. Our engineering backend system limits were tested when multiple customers simultaneously integrated with our platform. The result?

Some of our customers weren’t able to integrate. Cue: sinking feeling.

The product roadmap we had agreed to for the week was thrown out the window, and all hands were on deck to fix critical system issues, while delivering value to our new customers. At the same time that this was happening, we received feedback from a few existing large trial customers that we needed to tighten up the product and improve our offerings, ASAP, for them to convert.

I remember thinking back to something one of our mentors once said.

“In startups, it doesn’t get easier, it only gets faster.”

But just like personal growth, startup growth also happens in moments of discomfort. This growth doesn’t materialize in the traditional sense i.e., more customers, more employees, or more money in the bank. Instead, the discomfort forced us to identify new areas of improvement across the company — from business, to engineering, to team communication. The thought crossed my mind that the environment we all operated in suddenly shifted and that our company would need to level up to survive because the startup clock doesn’t wind back.

Warmly’s growth also necessitated personal growth. It’s at the point of breakage, when I’m scrapping and struggling against a deadline, that I can see clearly where the biggest and most important pains (and gains) are. And that’s when we can go back to the YC community, who are all going through the same thing, to commiserate and ask for advice. In this way, the team grows, the product grows, and so our company grows. YC’s advice is simple, but wise. Pursue growth.

It’s a never-ending, virtuous, innovative cycle of things breaking and fixing, all the time.

And yet, through all the insanity, we still make sure to find time to laugh, gently tease, and connect with each other through fun little team bonding activities, like Wikipedia races or Draw My Life.

What happened in Week 3 of Y Combinator?

Check out my cofounder Val Yermakova’s post Week 3 in Y Combinator.

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

What’s the origin of “Do Things That Don’t Scale”?

The quote actually originates from YC founder and legend Paul Graham. Paul Graham is famous for his startup essays and the one entitled “Do Things That Don’t Scale” is really worth the read.

In the article Paul describes how founders believe that they either will take off immediately, or not at all. But that’s not how it really works. In reality, you have to “take off” in different phases — from 0 to 1, from 1 to 10 and from 10 to 1,000. When you’re going from the 0 to 1 phase of figuring shit out, Paul says, you need to make things work for 1 customer. In doing so you should do things for that 1 customer that would never work for 10 customers or 1,000 customers.

This week in our Group Office Hours, our YC partners reminded us that the program was almost halfway over and Demo Day was just around the corner. They encouraged us to identify big unknowns that could be preventing us from reaching our goals, and solving them in the hackiest way possible. So we took the leap and tried three this week.

1. Spreadsheeting a feature

With our engineering team focused on scaling our backend this past week, I was shit out of luck on getting new features in the hands of users. One of the biggest ways we think we can add value to our users is by pushing the industry towards warm intros instead of cold outreach. Cold outreach in our minds is like throwing darts into the universe — you have to get real lucky to hit something and make a new sale. To that end, if we can help businesses move towards warm intros by thinking about their customers as a network, this will allow them to leverage those customers for new opportunities as opposed to cold outreach.

Many customers have told us they’d love to know which companies they could get warm intros to given the network they have. We realized we could create an easily searchable database (and recommendations) for just this using our algorithms — but it would have to wait until we could build it out in a few weeks. Channeling my inner Paul Graham, I thought about how I could do something that didn’t scale to get feedback on the effectiveness of the feature. So what did I do? “Spreadsheeted” the feature!

I decided to download my own LinkedIn Connections (to people who worked at companies that I could warm intro our customers to) and stick them in a spreadsheet. Then in the heart of our product (on the job changes tab) I added a single line of text

“Want more warm leads? Click here to view prospects”!

Adding a simple string to our product

And it went directly to a spreadsheet!

The spreadsheet we gave to customers.

Yes, in a live, functioning product. I immediately could start using it in a sales call and explain the desired effect.

The result? In less than 24 hours we had over 10 customers requesting intros.

2. Adding a direct line to the CEO

Customer feedback is the core of what makes Warmly better. The more interactions with our customers, the more likely we are to find product market fit and iterate towards a big meaningful business. If I don’t talk to 5 people a day about our product, I doubt I’ll be able to deeply understand the B2B sales & customer success worlds (due to my lack of experience in B2B). I decided to add my personal cell phone number in our product so that folks could literally reach out and text me any time. Yep — morning, noon or night. Feedback welcome. This might not be sustainable at 1,000 customers, but in the meantime I’m patiently waiting by the phone, doing something that doesn’t scale, hoping that a customer reaches out so I can learn more about what I can do to help them. Do you have questions / feedback about our business? Call me!

The result? Well actually no one has called me yet. But 2 customer have said they thought it was cool that they could.

3. Every customer deserves tender love & care

I set aside time this week to directly and personally connect with each of our customers. Since we set up shared Slack channels with each customer to massively reduce onboarding time and barriers for communication, it’s been easy to reach out in an authentic way (highly recommend!). The team and I realized that connecting via email with written text certainly wasn’t the best way to form a close relationship with our customers. We had already added images and jokes to our job change notification report emails but we still didn’t feel close to our customers. But what about the medium of video? With the rise of at home work, I’ve been delighted by the authenticity of seeing real people’s homes, interruptions by their kids, or even the occasional “hey I need to make lunch while we talk, hope that’s cool!”

Sending a video note to our customer Retool!

So that’s why I decided to record a selfie video for each of our customers letting them know how much they mean to us as a baby startup and how grateful we are for their continued business, support, and trust. And it really is true — we’d be nowhere without them.

The result? Happy customers who loved the gesture.…. And Carina (our CTO) reminded me after the fact that I need to smile next time before I start recording otherwise I’ll have just a grumpy starting face!

This week I realized how helpful it can be to do things that don’t scale. I won’t always be able to record personal customer videos. I won’t always be able to text with any customers. And I certainly won’t be able to stick random spreadsheets into our product (our CPO Val would kill me!). But nevertheless, while the product is nascent, the business just getting started, and the lack of learnings the biggest obstacle to our success, we’re willing to do whatever it takes to answer the hardest questions and explore opportunities that could lead to exponential growth.

‍

What happened in Week 4 of Y Combinator?

Check out my cofounder Alan Zhao’s post Week 4 in Y Combinator.

. . .

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

The Old Normal: In-Person Working

January — May

Since day 1 of the whole cofounding team working together, we have had:

Daily (M-Sat)

Daily standup

Weekly

Weekly mental health checkin

During this time there are a variety of things we can do. The process for this has been iterated upon. The ‘basic’ check-in we do is fill out a sheet on 6 different parameters and rate our personal satisfaction with each parameter from 1–10. Then we go around and share our ratings.

I’m also incredibly passionate about Non-Violent Communication, Conscious Leadership, and Authentic Relating so often times I will create a workshop for the team to go through. Some examples are in my blog, valy.space. But most of them I’ve yet to make time to document properly.

Weekly team gratitudes

During this time each team member takes a turn sitting in the “hot seat” while other people share a gratitude they have for them for something they did that week. At the end of each person’s turn, we bring our hands together and make a noise of their choosing — my “movement” is a ninja-style HIYAH!, Carina’s is a chicken noise and Alan forces us to beatbox. I won’t tell you what Max does, that’s top secret. Each new Warmly member creates their own noise that we use to honor the end of their gratitude.

Weekly team learning retrospective

Here we reflect back on the week and write about all the things we learned. There’s never enough time for everyone to share everything they learned — it’s insane! We learn an astonishing amount over the course of a week.

Weekly team bonding

Fun time! Each person takes a turn planning a team bonding event. We’ve done everything from learning how to draw, to kicking butt Wushu, to playing Jackbox, to yelling at each other over codenames.

Weekly personal time

From January to May, we were working 7 days a week with only 8am-1pm on Sundays devoted to personal time.

Once we finished Techstars and hit May, this became too much and we were feeling the burnout.

May

For the month of May, we decided to take every Saturday and Sunday off.

The New Normal: Remote Working

June — Present

Then YC started in June and we added Saturday back into our schedules, but we still protect Sundays.

Because of COVID, we decided to shift the company to remote — at least until the world opens back up again. This means that our small but mighty team has dispersed across North America and our process has to account for 3 different timezones (ET, PST, HST). People in Hawaii are waking up at 4am while New Yorkers get to rise and shine at 10am.

To account for the lack of in-person interaction but also the zoom-fatigue, we’ve increased our opportunities for bonding but decreased the time of each event.

Today our process is:

Daily (M-F)

• Stand-up

Weekly

• Learning retrospective
• Team lunch (NEW)
• Team gratitudes
• External gratitudes (NEW)

We added this in order to acknowledge all the external people who have been helping us along our journey. It really takes a village to make a startup.

Biweekly

• Mental health check-in (NOW BIWEEKLY)
• Team bonding (NOW BIWEEKLY)
• Process retrospective (NEW)

During this time we discuss if there is anything about our process that needs improving. It’s time for people to discuss timezone issues, request to have fewer meetings, request more meetings, etc.

• Market learning (NEW)

Absolutely essential. We are building a product for Customer Success and Salespeople and it is imperative that we maintain a consistent pulse on what these communities are discussing and feel are their most pressing issues. We are all responsible for finding an article, white paper, podcast, or blog post about a specific topic, ingesting that content and then teaching the rest of the team about what we learned.

Our team event calendar (where all 15 people attend)

This processes, while ever-evolving to our current needs, help us stay a well-oiled machine and keep us accountable for maintaining an equitable and inspiring team culture.

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What happened in Week 5 of Y Combinator?

Check out my cofounder Max Greenwald’s post Week 5 in Y Combinator.

. . .

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

We tier up all the job changes we automatically detect into layers of cross validation. For the top tier, detected job changes that are validated by our system’s internal checks as 100% correct, we automatically pass through to our customer. For the bottom tier, ones our system isn’t confident about, we run a final pass through our QA team.

While we’re constantly building and improving our automated data pipelines, we’ve found that having a set of human eyes is invaluable for catching edge cases. Each edge case lends itself to an insight. And each insight can inform incremental system level improvements that start to matter at scale. Our QA team is the final guard rail to catch the car before it swerves off the cliff into a sea of bad data.

QA Challenges We’ve Faced

As our customer base grows, so does our quality assurance team.

Unlike scaling software infrastructure, scaling a QA team comes with its own set of unique challenges. How do we onboard new QA members quickly? How do we ensure consistent output and accuracy? What happens when suddenly, overnight, the number of contacts we need to monitor increases 5 fold, and half our QA team isn’t available or is on religious holiday?

The most important of these scaling questions, the one that far eclipses the rest, is how do we establish trust?

Trust that a person is honest, that they will be available, that they will do what they say, that they act with our intentions in mind.

In the beginning trust was much easier to build because we were few (the QA team were people I knew I could trust: myself and my cofounder Carina). Then our needs outpaced our ability so we added a few more. But we could still meet with and get to know each person in the team and listen to their concerns and challenges. 

Scaling Trust

At some point though as Warmly grew, I realized I needed to start hiring QA managers, in addition to more QA folks. I went from knowing everyone, to knowing OF everyone, to not knowing what many of the members looked like. At a certain point it became impossible to keep track of everyone.

We started to see a slip in our data’s quality. New hires were making careless mistakes. They approved job changes that were clearly incorrect, even though everyone was trained on and used the same guidelines.

When we pointed out the mistakes to the managers to let their team know, it didn’t always stick. The members would correct their mistakes. Then a week would go by, and the same mistakes would crop up again.

For the earliest QA members (now managers), we interacted with them on a regular basis and got to know each other more personally. They understood Warmly’s mission and what we were trying to accomplish. In turn we got to know their own life goals. We built a relationship, and we established trust. We really enjoyed working with one another and they knew they were part of the family.

When we introduced layers of management, it allowed us to plan and coordinate in much larger groups. But it also prevented us from extending the human connection and empathy with the QA folks we were not interacting with regularly.

We realized we couldn’t replicate these interactions with everyone, but we could try something else; write them a letter. We could try to unite the QA team under our company’s shared vision, explaining to them why the work they’re doing is so important, and inspire them to take the shared ownership of quality.

And for those of you who are curious, below I’m sharing the exact letter we now send each new member of the QA team on their first day at Warmly. While it’s still early, we’ve already seen a lift in data quality, but more importantly, trust.

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A letter to Warmly’s finest

To the good people of Warmly QA,

All of you have been working hard, and we notice and appreciate the dedication. Thank you for your diligence and willingness to push through. Thank you for your positive attitude. And thank you for being a source of inspiration for the rest of the team.

I’d like to share with you all a bit about Warmly and how your work is contributing to changing the world.

Warmly’s Mission Statement

“Re-imagine the world of business through deeper connections”

What exactly does Warmly do?

In the simplest explanation, we help companies detect when their customers change jobs.

Why is this important for our customer?

Say, for example, one of our customers, Coca Cola, has a customer who moved from Google to Uber. Coca Cola wants to know about the job change ASAP so that they can find a new replacement advocate at Google or otherwise risk losing Google as a customer. At the same time, Coca Cola sales team wants to know about the job change so they can sell Coca Cola’s product to the new company, Uber, through the customer who just joined Uber.

Selling through a former customer has a 70% chance of conversion vs. cold outreach (throwing darts into the universe), which has only a 5% chance of conversion. It’s much easier to sell your product to someone who is already familiar and likes your product, just like it is much easier to work with someone who you are already familiar with and like working with!

How you are essential‍

The most crucial part of Warmly’s vision is realized through the work you all do. Every single contact you are able to find and every person you successfully detect as a job change is one more node that is added to the internal graph to build the customer network.

In the beginning the goal might look impossible. The QA team started with Carina, Carol, Emily and I searching google for people who might have changed jobs. It was slow but we never compromised on quality because we knew that high quality, accurate data was the only way we could win.

And we were right. Although we’re still a young budding startup, we’re growing fast. Because we are able to get the data back faster and more accurate than anyone else, we’ve received tons of positive emails from customers thanking Warmly for all the warm intros they were able to get.

Your efforts are being noticed from small startups like ours, to large, 500+ person companies. Customers across every industry are starting to look to Warmly, for warm intros to their future customers. And now that our QA team is growing, one job change detected will soon become 10,000, and one day, millions.

Our plan is to break into the world’s leading companies to revolutionize how sales is done across industries and geographies. People should not be sold products by salespeople, they should be referred products by their trusted friends, friends who want to advocate for a product they like and believe in. Warmly enables this to happen.

I’m not alone in being grateful for the amazing work you all are doing. It’s a hard road ahead, and at times stressful. But we’ll be with you each and every step of the way.

So on behalf of everyone here at Warmly,: Max, Val, Carina, Zack, Amanda, Emily, Brandon, Carol, Grant, Natalie, Sanil, Shahpar and myself, thank you again.

You are part of the family now and I hope you will see it as such. We rise and fall together.

Let’s go make a dent in the universe.

Warmly,

Sending you all our ❤️

What happened in Week 7 of Y Combinator?

Check out my cofounder Val Yermakova’s post Week 6 in Y Combinator.

. . .

‍

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

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.

‍

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

‍

What happened in Week 7 of Y Combinator?

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

. . .

‍

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].