Guilherme Lopes de RD Station
Café Fundador episodio 012
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 y sus 4 cofundadores llevan creando aplicaciones desde 2005, operando desde una ciudad del sur de Brasil. En 2011 vieron un hueco en el mercado sudamericano y empezaron a crear RD Station. Guilherme, gestor de producto de formación, asumió rápidamente la función de éxito del cliente dentro de la empresa y ahora dirige un equipo de más de 200 personas.
Tenemos una interesante charla sobre personas, cómo hacer un buen éxito de clientes y cómo construir grandes equipos y estructura.
Bienvenido a Founder Coffee.
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Jeroen: Hola, Guilherme. Encantado de tenerte en Founder Coffee.
Guilherme: ¿Cómo estás? Encantado de estar hoy aquí con vosotros.
Jeroen: You’re the Founder of RD Station. I think RD Station is mostly popular in Brazil and Portugal. Right?
Guilherme: Sí, exactamente.
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.
Lo que hace, como cualquier otra plataforma de automatización del marketing, es ayudar a las empresas a captar clientes en línea y hacer crecer su negocio con ello. Para ello, ofrece al cliente formas de convertir su audiencia en clientes potenciales, con elementos como una base de planificación, foros y ventanas emergentes.
A continuación, ayuda a los clientes a iniciar la relación con esos clientes potenciales, con marketing por correo electrónico y flujos de trabajo de automatización. La herramienta ayuda a los clientes a cualificar a los clientes potenciales con la puntuación de clientes potenciales y otra segmentación. Hay otro tipo de funciones que lo conectan con el embudo de ventas.
Así que conectamos con el CRM, ayudamos al comercial a entender lo que ocurrió durante el ciclo de marketing de ese cliente potencial concreto. Y así, en última instancia, es como las empresas venden más a través de sus canales online.
Jeroen: Así que RD Station trata realmente de ayudar a los vendedores a generar clientes potenciales y entregárselos a los vendedores. ¿Verdad?
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.
Lo que necesitan aquí es, en primer lugar, más servicio. Así que tenemos una mejor capa de éxito del cliente, servicio profesional, y también un programa de asociación muy fuerte con agencias de marketing que pueden ofrecer un buen servicio a un precio razonable para nuestros clientes.
También necesitan un precio razonable. Por eso tenemos un precio mucho más bajo que el de nuestros competidores. También necesitan una solución más sencilla; intentamos ofrecer todo lo que una plataforma debería ofrecer, como todas esas funciones de las que he hablado antes, pero presentándolo de una forma más sencilla para que el cliente entienda lo que tiene que hacer.
Por lo tanto, un nivel de madurez diferente, necesidades diferentes, bolsillo diferente y creemos que tenemos la solución perfecta para todas esas necesidades diferentes de una manera específica para los mercados emergentes.
Jeroen: Entiendo. ¿Puede darnos un ejemplo concreto? ¿Quizá sobre cómo hacen más accesibles ciertas funciones en comparación con otro software de automatización del marketing?
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.
Para algunas empresas, vemos que eso es una limitación. Esas son las empresas más grandes. Pero vemos que ayuda a que nuestro software sea más sencillo para las que están empezando con el inbound marketing y otros aspectos del marketing online.
Jeroen: ¿Cómo surgió RD Station? ¿Qué hacías antes de RD Station?
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.
Pero conseguimos llamar la atención del mercado brasileño y del mercado latinoamericano utilizando técnicas de inbound marketing.
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.
Así que, mal momento otra vez.
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.
Pero en todas esas startups diferentes, una cosa que había funcionado bastante bien era el tipo de marketing que hacíamos. Siempre tuvimos esta mentalidad de crear un embudo único que integrara marketing y ventas, utilizando técnicas de inbound marketing. Creábamos flujos de trabajo segmentados y luego hacíamos campañas de marketing. Y eso funcionaba.
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: ¿Cuánto tiempo trabajó sin cobrar un sueldo?
Guilherme: Casi dos años, creo.
Jeroen: ¿Dos años?
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: ¿Cuándo empezó de nuevo? ¿Hace cuántos años?
Guilherme: Empezamos a principios de 2011. Así que hace siete años.
Jeroen: Okay. So, you’re in it now for about seven years.
Guilherme: Sí, durante unos siete años.
Me gusta pensar que hasta ahora hemos tenido bastante éxito. Hemos pasado de no tener empleados a tener 600.
Jeroen: Vaya.
Guilherme: Y cero clientes a cerca de 1.000 clientes de pago.
Jeroen: A modo de comparación, ¿cuál es el tamaño de HubSpot?
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.
Hace poco hemos superado los 30 millones de ARR. Por lo general, cuando se piensa en una empresa con 600 empleados, se piensa que los ingresos son mucho más que eso. Pero es porque somos una empresa brasileña y uno de nuestros diferenciadores clave es el punto de precio y estamos vendiendo en nuestra moneda o la moneda que tenemos en América Latina. Esas monedas son mucho más débiles, más baratas que los dólares estadounidenses. Tenemos menos ingresos si pensamos en dólares. Aun así, tenemos menos costes porque todo cuesta menos y también pagamos a nuestros empleados y todo lo demás en esa moneda, así que las cuentas cuadran y funciona realmente bien.
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: Entendido. ¿Su ambición es mantenerse fuerte en los mercados emergentes y crecer a partir de ahí?
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: Genial. ¿Qué es lo que haces personalmente en 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.
Entonces descubrimos que los clientes, especialmente en el mundo SaaS, podían pagar un mes suficiente para el otro. Eso fue duro y descubrimos que solían llamar a esa cosa churn. También en ese momento, era 2012 creo, en ese momento siempre estábamos tratando de mirar el Silicon Valley. Estábamos estudiando las últimas tecnologías y vimos que estaban hablando de esta nueva cosa llamada éxito del cliente.
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.
Ahora mismo, el departamento de éxito del cliente abarca toda la operación de ventas, y eso incluye los servicios profesionales, que son sobre todo la implementación de servicios como el onboarding. Y luego tenemos un equipo dedicado a la asistencia, que es una asistencia rápida y reactiva, que ayuda a los clientes, soluciona problemas y averías, y utiliza ideas y cosas que se pueden resolver rápidamente con un simple correo electrónico, por ejemplo. Luego tenemos el equipo de gestión del éxito del cliente, que ayuda a los clientes a lo largo de su ciclo de vida después del periodo de incorporación, y les ayuda a gestionar sus planes hacia el éxito, y a evitar que se desvíen. Ayudamos a superar todos los obstáculos. El equipo es el punto de contacto más importante dentro de la empresa para el cliente.
Tenemos estas tres disciplinas diferentes bajo el éxito del cliente. Diferentes departamentos bajo el departamento de éxito del cliente aquí en RD.
Jeroen: Ya veo. ¿Los cinco cofundadores son ingenieros?
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: Y de todos los ingenieros, ¿por qué crees que fuiste tú el elegido o el que decidió dirigir el departamento de éxito de clientes?
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.
Después de construirlo, lo distribuíamos gratuitamente a esos clientes y les pedíamos que lo probaran, vieran si les gustaba y nos dieran su opinión. Así que estábamos utilizando estos servicios para entender a los clientes, para hacer realmente el desarrollo del cliente. Y me involucré con eso porque yo estaba bien la creación de los requisitos y lo que sería nuestro software. Así que empecé a involucrarme con los servicios y los clientes y cuando llegó el momento de que alguien ayudara a los clientes a superar sus retos y tener éxito utilizando nuestra plataforma, yo era el que estaba más preparado y tenía más conocimientos sobre eso en ese momento.
Jeroen: ¿El éxito del cliente y la gestión de productos siguen siendo un solo departamento en RD Station? ¿O se han separado? ¿Cómo trabajan juntos si se han separado?
Guilherme: No, nos separamos hace mucho tiempo. En realidad, en ese momento, nos trasladamos al éxito del cliente y creamos un comité para proponer ideas y especificaciones para el producto, pero más tarde se convirtió en parte del producto de ingeniería y ahora lo dividieron de nuevo entre ingeniería y producto.
Jeroen: Y esta comisión de la que hablas, ¿quién forma parte de ella?
Guilherme: Al principio el ingeniero era Bruno, yo el de éxito con el cliente, y el de marketing porque vendíamos un producto de marketing.
Jeroen: Entendido. ¿Así que involucras al equipo de marketing en las decisiones de producto en RD Station?
Guilherme: Claro. En realidad nosotros, durante mucho tiempo, fuimos nuestro cliente más avanzado.
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: Pasar de ser tu propio personaje a dejar de serlo, ¿cambió vuestra forma de trabajar?
Guilherme: Bueno, esto básicamente cambió la forma en que el equipo de producto trabaja. Así que cuando pensaban en trabajar en una nueva característica o mejorar una determinada característica, lo primero que solían hacer era ir al equipo de marketing y preguntarles sus puntos de dolor, quién está utilizando esas características, sus comentarios y todas esas cosas. Todavía lo hacen, pero es más como una recomendación. Ahora lo que hacen es entrevistar a un conjunto de clientes que representen mejor a las personas más comunes que tenemos.
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’.
Por eso nuestros clientes necesitan más conocimientos. Cuanto más sepan, más utilizarán nuestro software.
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.
Por ejemplo, el primer hito de éxito es lo que intentamos conseguir durante el periodo de incorporación. Así que vendemos un paquete de incorporación para conseguirlo. Y después, DCSM ayudará a los clientes a seguir el camino y superar cada uno de esos diferentes hitos.
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: ¿Cuáles son algunas de las cosas a las que poco a poco ha ido dedicando más tiempo?
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.
Luego, paso tiempo con el equipo de gestión del éxito del cliente para ayudarles a recibir la salida del cliente, la implementación y crear una metodología operativa muy estricta en la que acelerarán el crecimiento del cliente, el éxito del cliente, a través de puntos de contacto orquestados y proactivos.
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.
Y tienen que hacerlo a escala. Así que tienen que hacer esa llamada de una hora para todos los clientes. Construir esta operación es algo realmente difícil. Se necesitan muy buenos sistemas y muy buenos cuadros de mando de procesos, cuadros de mando individuales, revisión del rendimiento, en vista de la caza furtiva y todas esas cosas. Así que paso la mayor parte del tiempo pensando en cómo traducir esta estrategia en algo táctico y trabajando con los líderes de cada equipo para personalizar u orquestar todo eso.
Jeroen: Parece un gran reto.
Guilherme: Yeah it is. It’s a good thing I’m engineer. I think of customer success with an engineering mind.
Jeroen: Sí, con una mentalidad de proceso. Entonces, ¿cuántas horas trabajas en RD Station cada día?
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.
Dormir temprano, como a las 10 de la noche, para poder tener al menos siete u ocho horas de buen sueño. Y, por supuesto, a veces hay un tercer tiempo del juego que es durante la noche. Si hay que hacer algo para el día siguiente, trabajo una o dos horas más durante la noche.
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.
Genial. Eso suena como un infierno de una rutina.
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: Genial. Última pregunta, si tuvieras que empezar de nuevo con RD Station, ¿qué habrías hecho de forma diferente? Esta es la pregunta más difícil.
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.
Así que yo pensaría en el éxito no como arte, sino como ciencia y a escala.
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.
Así que esas son, por supuesto, las cosas que habría hecho de otra manera. Pensando desde la perspectiva del éxito del cliente.
Jeroen: Sí. Más procesos, más enfoque y más sistema.
Guilherme: Exactly. You can’t have success unless there is more science to a scalable machine and thinking of your persona segments.
Jeroen: Genial. Gracias por tus consejos y gracias Guilherme por estar en Founder Coffee.
Guilherme: Gracias a ti también. Ha sido un placer hablar contigo y estar aquí.
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