Guilherme Lopes von RD Station

Gründerkaffee Folge 012

Guilherme Lopes - Mitbegründer RD Station

I’m Jeroen from Salesflare and this is Founder Coffee.

Every two weeks I have coffee with a different founder. We discuss life, passions, learnings, … in an intimate talk, getting to know the person behind the company.

For this thirteenth episode, I talked to Guilherme Lopes, Co-Founder of RD Station, South America’s leading marketing automation software.

Guilherme und seine 4 Mitbegründer entwickeln seit 2005 Apps und arbeiten von einer Stadt im Süden Brasiliens aus. Im Jahr 2011 erkannten sie eine Lücke auf dem südamerikanischen Markt und begannen mit dem Aufbau von RD Station. Guilherme, der von Haus aus Produktmanager ist, übernahm schnell die Rolle des Kundenerfolgs im Unternehmen und leitet nun ein Team von über 200 Mitarbeitern.

Wir haben ein interessantes Gespräch über Personas, wie man guten Kundenerfolg erzielt und wie man gute Teams und Strukturen aufbaut.

Willkommen bei Founder Coffee.

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Jeroen: Hallo, Guilherme. Schön, dass Sie bei Founder Coffee dabei sind.

Guilherme: Wie geht es Ihnen? Ich freue mich, heute hier bei Ihnen zu sein.

Jeroen: You’re the Founder of RD Station. I think RD Station is mostly popular in Brazil and Portugal. Right?

Guilherme: Ja, genau.

Jeroen: For those who don’t know what RD Station does, what do you guys focus on?

Guilherme: Well, RD Station is a marketing automation platform. So it’s similar to products like Headstart, Marcato and others. But we focus on SMBs from emerging markets.

So we lead the Latin American market. We’re also getting started in some other countries like Spain and Portugal as well.

Wie jede andere Plattform für Marketing-Automatisierung hilft sie Unternehmen, online Kunden zu gewinnen und ihr Geschäft auszubauen. Es tut dies, indem es dem Kunden Möglichkeiten bietet, sein Publikum in Leads umzuwandeln, mit Dingen wie einer Planungsbasis, Foren und Pop-Ups.

Anschließend hilft es den Kunden, die Beziehung zu diesen Leads mit E-Mail-Marketing und Automatisierungsworkflows zu beginnen. Das Tool hilft den Kunden bei der Qualifizierung von Leads mit Lead Scoring und anderer Segmentierung. Es gibt andere Funktionen, die das mit dem Verkaufstrichter verbinden.

Wir stellen also eine Verbindung zum CRM her und helfen dem Vertriebsmitarbeiter zu verstehen, was während des Marketingzyklus dieses bestimmten Leads passiert ist. Und das ist letztendlich der Weg, wie Unternehmen mehr über ihre Online-Kanäle verkaufen.

Jeroen: Bei RD Station geht es also darum, Vermarktern dabei zu helfen, Leads zu generieren und sie an Vertriebsmitarbeiter weiterzugeben. Richtig?

Guilherme: Exactly. Yeah, more or less. It’s about tweaking the sales cycle and automating a part of it to shorten it.

Jeroen: You mentioned that it’s built for specific markets. What makes it better for, for instance, a Latin American market, or Spain? What makes RD Station different there?

Guilherme: That’s a great question. First, we started here. We know the market and its needs better. We know the maturity level of the market here in Latin America and other emerging countries is different from what we see in the west, or Europe.

Was sie hier brauchen, ist vor allem mehr Service. Wir haben also eine bessere Ebene für den Kundenerfolg, einen professionellen Service und auch ein sehr starkes Partnerschaftsprogramm mit Marketingagenturen, die unseren Kunden einen guten Service zu einem vernünftigen Preis bieten können.

Sie brauchen auch einen vernünftigen Preis. Deshalb haben wir einen Preis, der viel niedriger ist als der unserer Konkurrenten. Sie brauchen auch eine einfachere Lösung. Wir versuchen, alles zu bieten, was eine Plattform bieten sollte, z. B. all die Funktionen, über die ich vorhin gesprochen habe, aber in einer einfacheren Form, damit der Kunde versteht, was er tun muss.

Es gibt also einen unterschiedlichen Reifegrad, unterschiedliche Bedürfnisse, unterschiedliche Taschen, und wir glauben, dass wir die perfekte Lösung für all diese unterschiedlichen Bedürfnisse haben, und zwar speziell für die Schwellenländer.

Jeroen: Ich verstehe. Können Sie ein konkretes Beispiel nennen? Vielleicht, wie Sie bestimmte Funktionen im Vergleich zu anderer Marketing-Automatisierungssoftware zugänglicher machen?

Guilherme: First of all, we have less features – which is good because there is less complexity, for instance. In a more complex or robust company, you can have multiple funnels for different kind of projects, products, or personas. We only have one.

Bei einigen Unternehmen sehen wir darin eine Einschränkung. Das sind die größeren Unternehmen. Aber wir sehen, dass es unsere Software für diejenigen einfacher macht, die gerade erst mit Inbound-Marketing und anderen Online-Marketing-Aspekten beginnen.

Jeroen: Wie kam es zur Gründung von RD Station? Was haben Sie vor RD Station gemacht?

Guilherme: Well, we are five founders actually and we all have worked together before in 2005 in a company that used to build mobile apps. It was at a time when we didn’t have the iPhone yet. So we tried to thrive in this industry, but building mobile apps or using Java program language for those feature phones probably wasn’t the right timing and we failed because of that. It didn’t work.

Aber es ist uns gelungen, auf dem brasilianischen und lateinamerikanischen Markt mit Hilfe von Inbound-Marketing-Techniken Aufmerksamkeit zu erregen.

We are from south of Brazil. It’s not a big city. It’s a small capital in the south of Brazil and most of the bigger brands and companies are concentrated in south Sao Paulo. We basically got their attention by writing content. Having a blog, we had a way to manage a relationship with the leads we were generating. Later, the five of us were working together in that company, but we started different ventures because it didn’t work and again, every one of us failed in our new ventures. I for instance, tried to launch a company to build television apps, that also didn’t work quite well.

Jeroen: What does that mean – television apps?

Guilherme: You don’t even know, that’s why it didn’t work. When you turn on your TV, there are some apps like – the simplest one being the channel guide. But you can build apps on those platforms and even connect to the internet or social networks and things like that. But that didn’t work because now everybody uses Netflix and they use that on their app, which is packed with a lot of different apps too.

Also, wieder falsches Timing.

But again, I managed to get some attention from bigger brands and big companies at the time – like Sony and some different broadcasters. Again, all by doing some inbound marketing. Then we got together again.

I mean we had worked previously in that mobile apps company, and decided that we were starting our own ventures. We tried to create successful startups but it didn’t work quite well because of different reasons – maybe the timing or maybe the quality of the work we were selling.

Aber bei all diesen verschiedenen Startups hat die Art des Marketings, die wir betrieben haben, sehr gut funktioniert. Wir hatten immer die Einstellung, einen einzigartigen Trichter zu schaffen, der Marketing und Vertrieb integriert, indem wir Inbound-Marketing-Techniken einsetzen. Wir erstellten segmentierte Arbeitsabläufe und führten dann Marketingkampagnen durch. Und das hat funktioniert!

At the time, HubSpot wasn’t the number one platform because Marketo was bigger and I think Eloqua was bigger as well at the time. But they were growing pretty fast and had a more innovative way of thinking. We actually thought of reselling HubSpot and becoming a partner. Our CEO, Eric, actually approached them and they told him they weren’t looking at the Brazilian market yet so they weren’t interested. That’s when he decided to build our own product, get our own version of an inbound marketing platform which would be better than Marketo, Eloqua, HubSpot and is especially more adapted to the market we were in here.

He told us the idea and we all ultimately left the jobs we were at to work on it. I am an engineer or used to be, I don’t know. I had a well paying job; I was a product manager trying to run the television apps division and we literally left our paychecks or salary behind to start living on our savings. We did this to fully commit to the company since day one. And that was really the most important differentiator in making this company very successful. We have a very good team that had worked together in the past successfully without fighting each – that’s also a common reason why startups fail. We were fully committed to the bones to have no salary, to work 24/7 on that new venture. That was really important in the beginning.

Jeroen: Wie lange haben Sie ohne Gehalt gearbeitet?

Guilherme: Fast zwei Jahre, glaube ich.

Jeroen: Zwei Jahre?

Guilherme: Yeah. Almost. One year and a half actually. We actually started paying ourselves symbolic money that wouldn’t really pay for the rent or half of the rent. So we spent our savings for one and a half years, and almost all our personal savings too. When we got the first round of investment, which was actually an angel investment one year and a half later, I think we decided to start paying us some money to help with the bills.

Jeroen: Wann haben Sie wieder angefangen? Vor wie vielen Jahren?

Guilherme: Wir haben Anfang 2011 angefangen. Also vor sieben Jahren.

Jeroen: Okay. So, you’re in it now for about seven years.

Guilherme: Ja, seit etwa sieben Jahren.

Ich denke, dass wir bisher ziemlich erfolgreich sind. Wir sind von null auf 600 Beschäftigte gewachsen.

Jeroen: Wow.

Guilherme: Und von null Kunden zu etwa 1.000 zahlenden Kunden.

Jeroen: Wie groß ist HubSpot im Vergleich dazu?

Guilherme: I think they have about 30,000 customers and 1,200 employees or maybe 2,000 employees, something like that. I haven’t checked the numbers lately but I think they are double in size. Now they have a much bigger revenue.

Wir haben vor kurzem die 30 Millionen ARR überschritten. Wenn man an ein Unternehmen mit 600 Mitarbeitern denkt, denkt man normalerweise, dass der Umsatz viel höher ist. Aber das liegt daran, dass wir ein brasilianisches Unternehmen sind und eines unserer Hauptunterscheidungsmerkmale der Preis ist, und wir verkaufen in unserer Währung oder der Währung, die wir in Lateinamerika haben. Diese Währungen sind viel schwächer und billiger als der US-Dollar. Wir haben weniger Einnahmen, wenn wir an den Dollar denken. Dennoch haben wir weniger Kosten, weil alles weniger kostet, und wir bezahlen auch unsere Mitarbeiter und alles andere in dieser Währung, so dass die Rechnung aufgeht und es wirklich gut funktioniert.

Jeroen: Let’s say if you were to go to the US and start competing with HubSpot head on, then your cost structure would allow for much lower prices still?

Guilherme: Yeah but also we would have to increase our cost of acquisition. I don’t know, by 10 times maybe. They probably have a cost of acquisition that is 10 times more than ours and that’s our differentiator. We do not plan to go into the US. We are not planning to compete with those established inbound marketing platforms you have there because that’s our differentiator. We have a much lower cost of acquisition here because of the kind of market we are addressing and because of the maturity level we found in these countries. So the whole company is optimized to work on emerging markets.

On the other hand, HubSpot or others, don’t work really well here. For instance, if you look at Salesforce, they have got a really big chunk of the market here in Brazil. We still have more than 90 percent of the companies that don’t use ads to promote for instance. Among the 10 percent that use ads, you see a huge competition among Salesforce dynamics and other smaller CRM products like Pipedrive.

The problem is for those big brands, they optimize their machines, their acquisition machines, their retention machines for the US market – for bigger brands, for bigger companies. Those things don’t work in the emerging markets. So when you get here with the cost of acquisition of 5,000 or 10,000 dollars, even more sometimes, you have to have a really high price point and really high retention rate and definitely really high profitability. And all of that doesn’t work well when you have a market, where usually companies have much less maturity and depend more on service. So the whole model has to change. That’s why I think we would fail competing with them at least in the bigger markets. And those big markets, they will also fail competing with us in these emerging markets.

Jeroen: Verstehe. Ihr Ziel ist es also, in den Schwellenländern stark zu bleiben und von dort aus zu wachsen?

Guilherme: Yeah, exactly. Our ambition is to solve the needs for SMB’s in Latin America first and foremost. I mean we’re focused on those companies and we want to make them really successful with our solution.

Jeroen: Cool. Was machen Sie persönlich bei RD Station?

Guilherme: I run the customer success department. As I said in the beginning, I used to be an engineer. I think that every other young engineer that starts a company that you will write the code, publish your software and get rich. I too thought that it would work like that, but it didn’t. When we launched our software, we were really successful from a sales perspective. We sold like 20 accounts in one month and that was like a big win for us. We celebrated that. But even though we are selling like 600-700 or more accounts right now, that was a bigger win for us.

Dann entdeckten wir, dass Kunden, insbesondere in der SaaS-Welt, für einen Monat genug für den anderen bezahlen konnten. Das war schwierig, und wir entdeckten, dass man so etwas Churn nennt. Zu der Zeit, ich glaube es war 2012, haben wir auch immer versucht, uns das Silicon Valley anzuschauen. Wir haben die neuesten Technologien studiert und gesehen, dass sie über diese neue Sache namens Kundenerfolg sprachen.

And customer success is not really much of a new thing. It is basically post sales reinvented in a new discipline – of course there are new concepts over that.

My first impression was that they’re trying to come up with a better name for support and I was skeptical at first, especially when my partner and CEO asked me to think about starting this customer support department here at RD and help our customers be successful. I was skeptical. I was an engineer, I used to build products! But then I started studying it. It has already been six years and I started as a customer success manager, who does all sort of things for our customers at the beginning. So I was this big team of one person in the building and now the customer success team has more than 200 people.

Jeroen: Yeah. It’s one third of the company then.

Guilherme: One third of the company, yes. So as I said in the beginning that’s part of the way we work with our customers. We want to be close to them, we want to serve them, even though we are not charging for the service sometimes. But we decided that we want to help them overcome their problems with knowledge, maturity and resources.

Im Moment umfasst die Abteilung für Kundenerfolg den gesamten Vertrieb, einschließlich professioneller Dienstleistungen, die hauptsächlich die Implementierung von Dienstleistungen wie Onboarding umfassen. Und dann haben wir ein Team, das sich dem Support widmet, und der Support ist ein schneller, reaktiver Support, der die Kunden unterstützt, Pannen und Probleme behebt und Gedanken und Dinge nutzt, die man schnell lösen kann, indem man zum Beispiel eine E-Mail schreibt. Dann haben wir ein Kundenerfolgsmanagementteam, das den Kunden während ihres gesamten Lebenszyklus nach der Einführungsphase hilft und ihnen dabei hilft, ihre Pläne für den Erfolg zu verwalten und zu verhindern, dass sie sich ablenken lassen. Wir helfen, alle Hindernisse zu überwinden. Das Team ist für den Kunden die wichtigste Anlaufstelle innerhalb des Unternehmens.

Wir haben diese drei verschiedenen Disziplinen unter Kundenerfolg. Verschiedene Abteilungen unter der übergeordneten Abteilung für Kundenerfolg hier bei RD.

Jeroen: Ich verstehe. Sind alle fünf Mitbegründer Ingenieure?

Guilherme: No. Four. It’s a company of engineers. One guy worked with business administration. He started the marketing department awhile back and he still leads the main agenda for the marketing team. From the four engineers, one, Bruno, became the CTO of the company. So he runs all the engineering. Eric, also an engineer, is the CEO. I’m customer success, marketing for Andre and Pedro, the fifth founder, works as an engineer with Bruno’s team.

Jeroen: Und warum glauben Sie, dass Sie von allen Ingenieuren derjenige waren, der für die Leitung der Kundenerfolgsabteilung ausgewählt oder entschieden wurde?

Guilherme: That’s a good question. I used to do product management – building the requirements, the specs and design of what our product will be. At the beginning, we had to pay for our bills, so we started selling services as a consultant but we were afraid of becoming a service company. We had walked that path previously and it didn’t work well. We tried to build products and we were tagged as a software house or a service company. And those kind of companies don’t scale very well.

We desperately wanted to create a product that would scale. So our approach or way to sell service and produce service and still connect up with building a strong product was, to sell marketing services to companies and try to understand their needs. We would translate their needs into a product. So we would, for instance, create a landing page for them – coding the landing page. We would send email marketing campaigns, showing the exact results on an excel and anything like that. If the customers saw some value on that, it would be a green signal for us to build that feature inside of our software.

Nachdem wir es entwickelt hatten, verteilten wir es kostenlos an diese Kunden und baten sie, es auszuprobieren, zu sehen, ob es ihnen gefällt, und uns ein Feedback zu geben. Wir nutzten also diese Dienste, um die Kunden zu verstehen und um die Kundenentwicklung zu betreiben. Und ich habe mich daran beteiligt, weil ich die Anforderungen und unsere Software sehr gut entwickelt habe. Ich begann also, mich mit Dienstleistungen und Kunden zu befassen, und als es an der Zeit war, jemanden zu suchen, der den Kunden hilft, ihre Herausforderungen zu bewältigen und mit unserer Plattform erfolgreich zu werden, war ich derjenige, der besser vorbereitet war und mehr Wissen darüber hatte.

Jeroen: Sind Kundenerfolg und Produktmanagement immer noch eine Abteilung bei RD Station? Oder haben sie sich aufgeteilt? Wie arbeiten sie zusammen, wenn sie sich aufgeteilt haben?

Guilherme: Nein, wir haben uns schon vor langer Zeit aufgeteilt. Damals wechselten wir zum Kundenerfolg und gründeten ein Komitee, um Ideen und Spezifikationen für das Produkt zu entwickeln, aber später wurde es Teil des technischen Produkts und jetzt ist es wieder zwischen Technik und Produkt aufgeteilt.

Jeroen: Und dieser Ausschuss, von dem Sie sprechen, wer ist in diesem Ausschuss?

Guilherme: Am Anfang war Bruno der Ingenieur, ich war für den Kundenerfolg zuständig und das Marketing, weil wir ein Marketingprodukt verkauften.

Jeroen: Verstanden. Sie beziehen also das Marketingteam in die Produktentscheidungen bei RD Station ein?

Guilherme: Sicher. Eigentlich waren wir lange Zeit unser fortschrittlichster Kunde.

As people like to say, we eat our own dog food. Nowadays, we can’t use ourselves anymore in a customer model because in some ways we have outgrown what our ideal customer looks like; they have different needs. We already are a big company and that doesn’t necessarily translate to what our customers need.

But at the beginning, we were exactly that – a SMB for an emerging market trying to be successful using an inbound marketing platform. So yes, marketing has always had a big say in the product.

Jeroen: Wenn ihr nicht mehr eure eigene Persona seid, hat das eure Arbeitsweise verändert?

Guilherme: Nun, das hat die Arbeitsweise des Produktteams grundlegend verändert. Wenn sie also an einer neuen Funktion arbeiten oder eine bestimmte Funktion verbessern wollten, gingen sie als erstes zum Marketingteam und fragten sie nach ihren Schmerzpunkten, wer diese Funktionen nutzt, nach ihrem Feedback und all diesen Dingen. Das tun sie immer noch, aber es ist eher eine Empfehlung. Jetzt befragen sie eine Reihe von Kunden, die die häufigsten Personen, die wir haben, besser repräsentieren.

Jeroen: That’s cool. What is your focus exactly right now in the customer success department? How do you spend your typical day? How do you go about growing things?

Guilherme: Well, our company has a big big challenge – my department particularly. It is to grow our retention rates and expansion rates for a product that is relatively complex and you’re selling to SMBs. When you think of that equation, you think of churn. You wouldn’t sell a complex software for SMB and expect a very good adoption and retention rate. But still we want to overcome the challenge with a very well instrumented customer life cycle that we try to map, to go along with what we call ‘educational methodology’.

Unsere Kunden brauchen also mehr Wissen. Je mehr sie wissen, desto mehr werden sie unsere Software nutzen.

We created this methodology, called the ‘growth machine methodology’ and we have all these different success milestones. Like, the success milestone one is trying your first generation campaign. Success milestone two, is starting to build a relationship with your leads, and three is create accountant plan and so on. So we defined it into different steps based on the maturity level of the customer. And we tried to tie that together into the customer life cycle.

Der erste Erfolgsmeilenstein ist zum Beispiel das, was wir während der Einführungsphase erreichen wollen. Wir verkaufen also ein Onboarding-Paket, das darauf abgestimmt ist. Und danach hilft DCSM den Kunden, dem Weg zu folgen und jeden dieser verschiedenen Meilensteine zu erreichen.

We also create a lot of content organized around that methodology. We think that with a very strong methodology, you need good educational content. That’s why we created a university called “RD University” and we are not only producing content for our customers, but also for our market leads and potential future customers. With that well orchestrated life cycle, we offer implementation specialists, customer success managers, support, and different specialist for different needs, different stages of life cycles.

We still need to instrument this better so that we are having only one conversation with one customer, to avoid being repetitive or confusing the customer. Orchestrating all of that together, we can create a success machine that will accelerate the potential growth, the potential success for the kind of companies we are selling to – SMBs from emerging markets. That per say, is an enormous challenge but we’ve had some success so far and we’re still improving.

Jeroen: Was sind die Dinge, für die Sie nach und nach mehr Zeit aufgewendet haben?

Guilherme: I spend a lot of my time helping the implementation team to fine tune the tasks of the implementation so that they don’t end up delivering a project that does not tie to the overall goal, to the long term plan. We need to tie those things together.

Dann verbringe ich Zeit mit dem Kundenerfolgsmanagementteam, um ihnen dabei zu helfen, den Kundenoutput zu erhalten, ihn zu implementieren und eine sehr strikte operative Methodik zu entwickeln, mit der sie das Kundenwachstum und den Kundenerfolg durch orchestrierte und proaktive Berührungspunkte beschleunigen können.

We work with SMBs, so it’s a high volume operation. We can’t rely on the customer success manager talent itself to understand the customer’s needs, problems and then translate them into a plan and help customers stick to the plan. So, I need to instrument a system to show warnings and alerts to those CSN’s so that are able to quickly understand what is going on in a couple of minutes, call the customers, and be well trained using our methodology to help the customer understand what is the next best logical step for them to take and come up with some tactic for them to do that.

Und das müssen sie in großem Umfang tun. Sie müssen also diesen einstündigen Anruf für alle Kunden tätigen. Der Aufbau dieser Operation ist wirklich schwierig. Man braucht sehr gute Systeme und sehr gute Prozess-Dashboards, individuelle Dashboards, Leistungsüberprüfungen, Abwerbung und all diese Dinge. Ich verbringe also die meiste Zeit damit, darüber nachzudenken, wie man diese Strategie in etwas Taktisches umsetzen kann, und mit den Leitern der einzelnen Teams zusammenzuarbeiten, um all das zu personalisieren oder zu orchestrieren.

Jeroen: Das klingt nach einer großen Herausforderung.

Guilherme: Yeah it is. It’s a good thing I’m engineer. I think of customer success with an engineering mind.

Jeroen: Ja, mit einer prozessorientierten Denkweise. Wie viele Stunden arbeiten Sie jeden Tag an RD Station?

Guilherme: Hours? Well I’m a big fan of routines. I don’t see myself as a disciplined guy, but that’s why I’m big fan of routines because when I put in place a straight crew team it helps me be more focused, stay energized, put out today and deliver more in the same amount of time. And that means not only being disciplined about how many hours you work on, but also what you will work and your free time – your reading time, praying or meditation time, about the time you spend with your family. Because without those things, you will become an imbalanced professional and an imbalanced professional, cannot deliver results.

So, in terms of hours, I usually wake up at six, shower and meditate. I get some eggs, a nice couple of coffee, and I start working from home. I try to not step into the office until noon because I am much more productive in the mornings. I try to spare the time for ‘makers time’, where I work on projects – the most important objective there is for the day. I try to finish the most important object of the day by 10 at most or 11. And then I go to the office. My afternoons are full; usually fully booked with meetings, so I have like five meetings in a row in the afternoons.

When you have a 600 employees company and you are the founder, you know a lot how often things work, you don’t necessarily have everything well documented and instrumented. So people tend to come up to you to ask some things and I try to not have quick chats with everyone that steps into your office every 15 minutes. I try to schedule, even if it’s a 20 minute meeting. For every meeting, I try to have an agenda and objective and with that in mind, I will do things usually with the leaders of my team, so I have right now eight direct reports.

I do the same with my peers, other executives of the company and any other person on the inside. We often do these skip level meetings, we do talks, provided that they have an agenda or an objective – I schedule a meeting with anyone. It keeps the proximity with the whole team. So that’s why I come in to the office for a lot of meetings. So there is a lot of talking during the afternoon and by the end of the day, exactly 6:30, I go to the gym.

And as I said, that is also a part of getting balance in your life to become more productive. Everyone needs to exercise and my latest hack for doing exercise every day or at least three times a week, is hiring a personal trainer. Not because I need it, but because I am paying and I am committed because I’m paying. And second because he’s waiting for me 6:30 three times a week and I have to go and so I won’t let him keep waiting for me. That forces me to get back to the gym and home and that forces me to deliver whatever I needed to deliver within the hours I have in the office. So I go, I exercise, I dine, I chill out and on a perfect day, I will sleep.

Ich schlafe früh, etwa um 10 Uhr nachts, damit ich mindestens sieben bis acht Stunden gut schlafen kann. Und natürlich gibt es manchmal noch eine dritte Spielzeit, die in der Nacht liegt. Wenn ich etwas für den nächsten Tag erledigen muss, arbeite ich in der Nacht noch ein oder zwei Stunden.

I try to avoid that because that prevents me from having a good sleep not only because of the number of hours I’m sleeping but also because I go to bed thinking of that thing that we’re doing because didn’t have time to chill out and everyone needs at least six hour of good sleep so they can be more productive during the day. That means that you can work 9-10 hours in a day, but it will still produce the same amount of work that a person might take 16 hours for.

Jeroen: Cool. Das klingt nach einem tollen Programm.

Guilherme: It’s quite simple actually. But you have to be disciplined.

Jeroen: Yeah. If you have this kind of routine, it provides some kind of stability I suppose. Like I read once, it’s a writer but I forgot the name, he said something like that you need to have some routine so that you can be more creative in your work because you create some stability through your routine which then makes it that you don’t have to focus on these things. So that when you’re actually creating things, you have the energy and the time to do it. I think I would try it once.

Guilherme: I’m a big believer in having a routine for things not related to work. If you are not disciplined about the quality time with your family, if you’re not disciplined about having quality time for praying or for exercising, then you just think that you need spare time and those things will naturally fit on that in the spare time. But it just won’t happen and you need all those things to refresh, rebuild, become more creative, do better with the stress and the pressure.

Jeroen: Yeah, definitely. Talking about writing and slowly wrapping up as well, what’s the latest good book you’ve read and why did you choose to read it?

Guilherme: The latest book was the Jocko Willink, the discipline playbook I think or field play book of discipline. It is actually a quite simple book but it’s related to some of those things we were talking about and how discipline means freedom. We can only be free if you’re disciplined with things you try for.

Jeroen: I found the title of the book. It’s Discipline Equals Freedom a Field Manual by Jocko Willink, right?

Guilherme: That is the one. It’s a good book to understand this concept.

Jeroen: Cool. Letzte Frage: Wenn du mit RD Station noch einmal von vorne anfangen könntest, was würdest du anders machen? Das ist die schwierigste Frage.

Guilherme: Yeah, it is difficult because of course I would have done a lot of things differently because you learn along the way. Still those learnings are important because of that cliché that ‘the journey matters the most’ is actually true. I wouldn’t learn the things I learned if I hadn’t made those mistakes. But since I already have the knowledge, some of the things I would have done differently, I would since day one try to create this success machine in a more scalable way, thinking of either a replicable operation and thinking more of a funnel. I would not do whatever is needed to make a customer successful, I need a very good machine that will turn that customer successful at a very good conversion rate. And that needs to work in a well oiled fashion. That’s one thing.

Ich würde den Erfolg also nicht als Kunst, sondern als Wissenschaft und in großem Maßstab betrachten.

The other important thing is thinking of our persona. In the beginning, you want to sell to someone who has a cost and a wallet. You still don’t know exactly what your product will become, who will be more successful with your product. It takes you some time to say no to certain kind of requests and certain kind of customers. So right now, we have a better understanding of what our persona is and know more of what is the kind of customers that won’t be able to achieve success with our product; we call them the bad fits. In the beginning we didn’t know that, but now we do and we could have gone or grown much faster if we had that knowledge in the beginning and if we had built a software thinking of that persona and if we had also not tried to pursue or sell or make those kinds of customers successful.

Das sind natürlich die Dinge, die ich anders gemacht hätte. Ich denke aus der Perspektive des Kundenerfolgs.

Jeroen: Ja. Mehr Prozesse, mehr Fokus und mehr System.

Guilherme: Exactly. You can’t have success unless there is more science to a scalable machine and thinking of your persona segments.

Jeroen: Cool. Danke für deinen Rat und danke, Guilherme, dass du bei Founder Coffee dabei bist.

Guilherme: Ich danke Ihnen auch. Es war schön, mit Ihnen zu sprechen und hier zu sein.

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Jeroen Corthout
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