Guilherme Lopes de RD Station

Café du fondateur épisode 012

Guilherme Lopes - Co-fondateur RD Station

Je suis Jeroen de Salesflare et voici 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 et ses 4 cofondateurs créent des applications depuis 2005, dans une ville du sud du Brésil. En 2011, ils ont constaté un manque sur le marché sud-américain et ont commencé à construire RD Station. Gestionnaire de produits de formation, Guilherme a rapidement assumé le rôle de responsable de la réussite des clients au sein de l'entreprise et dirige aujourd'hui une équipe de plus de 200 personnes.

Nous avons une discussion intéressante sur les personas, sur la manière de faire du bon succès client et sur la manière de construire des équipes et une structure de qualité.

Bienvenue à Founder Coffee.

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Jeroen : Bonjour, Guilherme. C'est un plaisir de vous recevoir sur Founder Coffee.

Guilherme : Comment allez-vous ? Je suis ravi d'être ici avec vous aujourd'hui.

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

Guilherme : Oui, exactement.

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.

Comme toute autre plateforme d'automatisation du marketing, elle aide les entreprises à acquérir des clients en ligne et à développer ainsi leur activité. Pour ce faire, elle offre à ses clients des moyens de convertir leur audience en prospects, grâce à des éléments tels qu'une base de planification, des forums et des fenêtres contextuelles.

Il aide ensuite les clients à entamer la relation avec ces clients potentiels, grâce à des flux de travail de marketing par courriel et d'automatisation. L'outil aide les clients à qualifier les prospects grâce à l'évaluation des prospects et à d'autres formes de segmentation. Il existe d'autres types de fonctionnalités qui permettent de faire le lien avec l'entonnoir des ventes.

Nous nous connectons donc au CRM et aidons le commercial à comprendre ce qui s'est passé au cours du cycle de commercialisation de ce client potentiel. En fin de compte, c'est ainsi que les entreprises vendent davantage par l'intermédiaire de leurs canaux en ligne.

Jeroen : RD Station a donc pour but d'aider les spécialistes du marketing à générer des leads et à les transmettre aux vendeurs. C'est bien cela ?

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.

Ce dont ils ont besoin, c'est d'abord de plus de services. Nous disposons donc d'un meilleur niveau de réussite des clients, d'un service professionnel et d'un programme de partenariat très solide avec des agences de marketing qui peuvent offrir un bon service à un prix raisonnable à nos clients.

Ils ont également besoin d'un prix raisonnable. Notre prix est donc bien inférieur à celui de nos concurrents. Ils ont également besoin d'une solution plus simple ; nous essayons d'offrir tout ce qu'une plateforme devrait offrir, comme toutes les fonctionnalités dont j'ai parlé précédemment, mais nous les présentons d'une manière plus simple pour que le client comprenne ce qu'il doit faire.

Donc, un niveau de maturité différent, des besoins différents, une poche différente et nous pensons que nous avons la solution parfaite pour tous ces besoins différents d'une manière spécifique pour les marchés émergents.

Jeroen : Je vois. Pouvez-vous nous donner un exemple concret de la manière dont vous rendez certaines fonctionnalités plus accessibles par rapport à d'autres logiciels d'automatisation du 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.

Pour certaines entreprises, nous constatons qu'il s'agit d'une limitation. Il s'agit des grandes entreprises. Mais nous constatons que cela simplifie notre logiciel pour celles qui débutent dans l'inbound marketing et d'autres aspects du marketing en ligne.

Jeroen : Comment est née la RD Station ? Que faisiez-vous avant 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.

Mais nous avons réussi à attirer l'attention du marché brésilien et du marché latino-américain en utilisant des techniques d'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.

Encore une fois, le moment est mal choisi.

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.

Mais dans toutes ces différentes startups, une chose qui a très bien fonctionné est le type de marketing que nous faisions. Nous avons toujours eu l'idée de créer un entonnoir unique qui intègre le marketing et les ventes, en utilisant des techniques de marketing entrant. Nous avons créé des flux de travail segmentés, puis des campagnes de marketing. Et cela fonctionnait !

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 : Combien de temps avez-vous travaillé sans salaire ?

Guilherme : Presque deux ans, je crois.

Jeroen : Deux ans ?

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 : Quand avez-vous recommencé ? Il y a combien d'années ?

Guilherme : Nous avons commencé au début de l'année 2011. Il y a donc sept ans.

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

Guilherme : Oui, depuis environ sept ans.

J'aime à penser que nous avons bien réussi jusqu'à présent. Nous sommes passés de zéro à 600 employés.

Jeroen : Wow.

Guilherme : De zéro client à environ 1 000 clients payants.

Jeroen : A titre de comparaison, quelle est la taille 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.

Nous avons récemment franchi la barre des 30 millions d'ARR. Habituellement, quand on pense à une entreprise de 600 employés, on pense que le chiffre d'affaires est beaucoup plus élevé que cela. Mais c'est parce que nous sommes une entreprise brésilienne et que l'un de nos principaux facteurs de différenciation est le prix et que nous vendons dans notre monnaie ou dans la monnaie que nous avons en Amérique latine. Ces monnaies sont beaucoup plus faibles et moins chères que le dollar américain. Nous avons moins de revenus en dollars. Cependant, nous avons moins de coûts parce que tout coûte moins cher et nous payons également nos employés et tout le reste dans cette devise.

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 : J'ai compris. Votre ambition est donc de rester fort sur les marchés émergents et de vous développer à partir de là ?

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. Que faites-vous personnellement à 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.

Puis nous avons découvert que les clients, en particulier dans le monde du SaaS, pouvaient payer un mois suffisamment pour l'autre. C'était difficile et nous avons découvert ce qu'on appelle le churn. À l'époque, c'était en 2012 je crois, nous essayions toujours d'observer la Silicon Valley. Nous étudiions les dernières technologies et nous avons vu qu'ils parlaient de cette nouvelle chose appelée succès client.

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.

À l'heure actuelle, le département de la réussite des clients comprend l'ensemble des opérations de vente, y compris les services professionnels, qui consistent principalement en la mise en œuvre de services tels que l'onboarding. Ensuite, nous avons une équipe dédiée à l'assistance, et l'assistance est rapide, réactive, elle soutient les clients, les ruptures et les corrections, et utilise des réflexions et des choses que l'on peut résoudre rapidement en utilisant simplement un e-mail par exemple. Ensuite, nous avons l'équipe de gestion de la réussite des clients, qui aide les clients tout au long de leur cycle de vie après la période d'intégration, et qui les aide à gérer leurs plans de réussite et à ne pas se laisser distraire. Nous les aidons à surmonter tous les obstacles. L'équipe est le point de contact le plus important pour le client au sein de l'entreprise.

Nous avons trois disciplines différentes dans le cadre de la réussite des clients. Différents départements au sein du département principal de la réussite des clients ici à RD.

Jeroen : Je vois. Les cinq cofondateurs sont-ils tous des ingénieurs ?

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 : Et parmi tous les ingénieurs, pourquoi pensez-vous que vous avez été choisi ou décidé de diriger le département "Customer Success" ?

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.

Après l'avoir construit, nous le distribuions gratuitement à ces clients et leur demandions de l'essayer, de voir s'il leur plaisait et de nous faire part de leurs commentaires. Nous utilisions donc ces services pour comprendre les clients, pour faire du développement client. J'ai été impliqué dans ce processus parce que j'étais en mesure de créer les exigences et de définir ce que serait notre logiciel. J'ai donc commencé à m'impliquer dans les services et les clients et lorsque le moment est venu pour quelqu'un d'aider les clients à surmonter leurs difficultés et à réussir à utiliser notre plateforme, j'étais celui qui était le mieux préparé et qui avait le plus de connaissances à ce sujet à l'époque.

Jeroen : La réussite des clients et la gestion des produits constituent-elles toujours un seul et même département chez RD Station ? Ou se sont-ils séparés ? Comment travaillent-ils ensemble s'ils se sont séparés ?

Guilherme : Non, nous nous sommes séparés il y a longtemps. En fait, à l'époque, nous sommes passés au succès client et nous avons créé un comité chargé de proposer des idées et des spécifications pour le produit, mais par la suite, il a été intégré au produit d'ingénierie et maintenant, il est à nouveau divisé entre l'ingénierie et le produit.

Jeroen : Et ce comité dont vous parlez, qui en fait partie ?

Guilherme : Au début, Bruno était l'ingénieur, moi le responsable de la réussite des clients, et le marketing parce que nous vendions un produit de marketing.

Jeroen : J'ai compris. Vous impliquez donc l'équipe marketing dans les décisions relatives aux produits chez RD Station ?

Guilherme : Bien sûr. En fait, pendant une longue période, nous avons été notre client le plus avancé.

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 : Donc, si vous êtes passé de votre propre personnage à celui que vous n'êtes plus, cela a-t-il changé votre façon de travailler ?

Guilherme : Cela a fondamentalement changé la façon dont l'équipe produit travaille. Ainsi, lorsqu'elle envisage de travailler sur une nouvelle fonctionnalité ou d'améliorer une fonctionnalité donnée, la première chose qu'elle fait est d'aller voir l'équipe marketing et de lui demander quels sont les points douloureux, qui utilise ces fonctionnalités, leurs commentaires et toutes ces choses. C'est toujours le cas, mais il s'agit davantage d'une recommandation. Aujourd'hui, ils interrogent un ensemble de clients qui représentent mieux le persona le plus courant que nous ayons.

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’.

Nos clients ont donc besoin de plus de connaissances. Plus ils en sauront, plus ils utiliseront nos logiciels.

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.

Par exemple, la première étape de la réussite est celle que nous essayons d'atteindre au cours de la période d'intégration. Nous vendons donc un package d'intégration qui s'y rattache. Ensuite, le DCSM aide les clients à suivre le chemin et à franchir chacune de ces étapes.

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 : Quelles sont les choses auxquelles vous avez progressivement consacré plus de temps ?

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.

Ensuite, je passe du temps avec l'équipe de gestion de la réussite des clients pour l'aider à recevoir les résultats des clients, à les mettre en œuvre et à créer une méthodologie opérationnelle très stricte qui leur permettra d'accélérer la croissance et la réussite des clients grâce à des points de contact orchestrés et proactifs.

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.

Et ils doivent le faire à grande échelle. Ils doivent donc pouvoir appeler tous les clients en une heure. La mise en place de cette opération est très difficile. Il faut mettre en place de très bons systèmes et disposer de très bons tableaux de bord de processus, de tableaux de bord individuels, d'évaluation des performances, compte tenu du braconnage et de toutes ces choses. Je passe donc le plus clair de mon temps à réfléchir à la manière de traduire cette stratégie en quelque chose de tactique et à travailler avec les responsables de chaque équipe pour personnaliser ou orchestrer tout cela.

Jeroen : Cela semble être un énorme défi.

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

Jeroen : Oui, avec un état d'esprit de processus. Combien d'heures travaillez-vous chaque jour sur 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.

Je me couche tôt, à 10 heures du matin, afin d'avoir au moins sept à huit heures de sommeil réparateur. Et bien sûr, il y a parfois un troisième temps de jeu qui se déroule pendant la nuit. Si je dois faire quelque chose pour le lendemain, je travaille une ou deux heures de plus pendant la nuit.

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. Ça a l'air d'être une sacrée routine.

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. Dernière question, si vous deviez recommencer avec RD Station, qu'auriez-vous fait différemment ? C'est la question la plus difficile.

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.

Je pense donc que la réussite ne relève pas de l'art, mais de la science et de l'échelle.

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.

Ce sont bien sûr les choses que j'aurais faites différemment. Réfléchir du point de vue de la réussite du client.

Jeroen : Oui. Plus de processus, plus de concentration et plus de système.

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

Jeroen : Cool. Merci pour vos conseils et merci à Guilherme d'être présent sur Founder Coffee.

Guilherme : Merci à vous aussi. C'était un plaisir de parler avec vous et d'être ici.

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Jeroen Corthout
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