Guilherme Lopes do RD Station

Episódio 012 do Founder Coffee

Guilherme Lopes - Cofundador do 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 e seus 4 cofundadores desenvolvem aplicativos desde 2005, operando em uma cidade no sul do Brasil. Em 2011, eles perceberam uma lacuna no mercado sul-americano e começaram a desenvolver o RD Station. Gerente de produto por formação, Guilherme rapidamente assumiu a função de sucesso do cliente na empresa e agora lidera uma equipe de mais de 200 pessoas.

Teremos uma conversa interessante sobre personas, como fazer um bom sucesso do cliente e como criar ótimas equipes e estrutura.

Bem-vindo ao Founder Coffee.

—

Prefere ouvir? Você pode encontrar esse episódio em:

—

Jeroen: Oi, Guilherme. É um prazer tê-lo no Founder Coffee.

Guilherme: Como você está? É ótimo estar aqui com você hoje.

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

Guilherme: Sim, exatamente.

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.

O que ela faz, como qualquer outra plataforma de automação de marketing, é ajudar as empresas a adquirir clientes on-line e aumentar seus negócios com isso. Ela faz isso oferecendo ao cliente maneiras de converter seu público em leads, com coisas como uma base de planejamento, fóruns e pop-ups.

Em seguida, ela ajuda os clientes a iniciar o relacionamento com esses leads, com marketing por e-mail e fluxos de trabalho de automação. A ferramenta ajuda os clientes a qualificar os leads com pontuação de leads e outras segmentações. Há outros tipos de recursos que conectam isso ao funil de vendas.

Assim, nos conectamos com o CRM e ajudamos o vendedor a entender o que aconteceu durante o ciclo de marketing desse lead específico. E isso, em última análise, é como as empresas vendem mais por meio de seus canais on-line.

Jeroen: Então, o RD Station tem como objetivo ajudar os profissionais de marketing a gerar leads e entregá-los ao pessoal de vendas. Certo?

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.

O que eles precisam aqui é, em primeiro lugar, de mais serviços. Portanto, temos uma camada melhor de sucesso do cliente, serviço profissional e também um programa de parceria muito forte com agências de marketing que podem oferecer um bom serviço a um preço razoável para nossos clientes.

Eles também precisam de um preço razoável. Portanto, temos um preço muito mais baixo que o de nossos concorrentes. Eles também precisam de uma solução mais simples; tentamos oferecer tudo o que uma plataforma deve oferecer, como todos os recursos sobre os quais falei anteriormente, mas ainda assim apresentamos tudo isso de uma forma mais simples para que o cliente entenda o que precisa fazer.

Portanto, um nível de maturidade diferente, necessidades diferentes, bolso diferente, e acreditamos que temos a solução perfeita para todas essas necessidades diferentes de uma forma específica para os mercados emergentes.

Jeroen: Entendo. Você pode dar um exemplo específico? Talvez sobre como você torna determinados recursos mais acessíveis em comparação com outros softwares de automação de 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 algumas empresas, vemos que isso é uma limitação. Essas são as empresas maiores. Mas vemos que isso ajuda nosso software a se tornar mais simples para aquelas que estão apenas começando com o inbound marketing e outros aspectos do marketing on-line.

Jeroen: Como surgiu o RD Station? O que você estava fazendo antes do 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.

Mas conseguimos chamar a atenção do mercado brasileiro e do mercado latino-americano usando 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.

Então, novamente o momento errado.

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.

Mas em todas essas startups diferentes, uma coisa que funcionou muito bem foi o tipo de marketing que estávamos fazendo. Sempre tivemos essa mentalidade de criar um funil exclusivo que integrasse marketing e vendas, usando técnicas de inbound marketing. Criamos fluxos de trabalho segmentados e depois fizemos campanhas de marketing. E isso estava funcionando!

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: Por quanto tempo você trabalhou sem salário?

Guilherme: Quase dois anos, eu acho.

Jeroen: Dois anos?

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: Quando foi que você começou a trabalhar novamente? Há quantos anos?

Guilherme: Começamos no início de 2011. Portanto, há sete anos.

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

Guilherme: Sim, por cerca de sete anos.

Gosto de pensar que fomos muito bem-sucedidos até agora. Passamos de nenhum funcionário para 600 funcionários.

Jeroen: Uau.

Guilherme: E de zero clientes para cerca de 1.000 clientes pagantes.

Jeroen: Para fins de comparação, qual é o tamanho da 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.

Ultrapassamos a marca de 30 milhões de ARR recentemente. Normalmente, quando pensamos em uma empresa com 600 funcionários, achamos que a receita é muito maior do que isso. Mas isso acontece porque somos uma empresa brasileira e um de nossos principais diferenciais é o preço, e estamos vendendo em nossa moeda ou na moeda que temos na América Latina. Essas moedas são muito mais fracas e baratas do que o dólar americano. Temos menos receita quando pensamos em dólares. Ainda assim, temos menos custos porque tudo custa menos e também pagamos nossos funcionários e tudo o mais nessa moeda, de modo que a matemática se soma e funciona muito bem.

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: Entendi. Então, sua ambição é manter-se forte nos mercados emergentes e crescer a partir daí?

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: Legal. O que você faz pessoalmente no 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.

Em seguida, descobrimos que os clientes, especialmente no mundo SaaS, podiam pagar por um mês o suficiente para o outro. Isso foi difícil e descobrimos que eles costumavam chamar isso de churn. Além disso, na época, acho que era 2012, estávamos sempre tentando olhar para o Vale do Silício. Estávamos estudando as tecnologias mais recentes e vimos que eles estavam falando sobre essa nova coisa chamada sucesso do 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.

No momento, o departamento de sucesso do cliente abrange toda a operação de vendas, o que inclui serviços profissionais, que são principalmente a implementação de serviços como a integração. E depois temos uma equipe dedicada ao suporte, que é um suporte rápido e reativo, dando suporte aos clientes, interrupções e correções, e usando pensamentos e coisas que podem ser resolvidas rapidamente usando apenas um e-mail, por exemplo. Depois, temos a equipe de gerenciamento do sucesso do cliente, que ajuda os clientes durante todo o seu ciclo de vida após o período de integração e os ajuda a gerenciar seus planos de sucesso, evitando que se desviem do caminho. Ajudamos a superar todos os obstáculos. A equipe é o ponto de contato mais importante dentro da empresa para o cliente.

Temos essas três disciplinas diferentes sob o sucesso do cliente. Diferentes departamentos sob o departamento principal de sucesso do cliente aqui na RD.

Jeroen: Estou vendo. Todos os cinco cofundadores são engenheiros?

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: E de todos os engenheiros, por que você acha que foi o escolhido ou decidiu liderar o departamento de sucesso do cliente?

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.

Depois de criá-lo, nós o distribuíamos gratuitamente para esses clientes e pedíamos que eles o experimentassem, vissem se gostavam e nos dessem algum feedback. Portanto, estávamos usando esses serviços para entender os clientes, para realmente fazer o desenvolvimento do cliente. E eu me envolvi com isso porque estava criando os requisitos e o que seria o nosso software. Então, comecei a me envolver com serviços e clientes e, quando chegou a hora de alguém ajudar os clientes a superar seus desafios e obter sucesso usando nossa plataforma, eu era a pessoa mais preparada e com mais conhecimento sobre isso na época.

Jeroen: O sucesso do cliente e o gerenciamento de produtos ainda são um departamento único no RD Station? Ou eles se separaram? Como eles trabalham juntos, caso tenham se separado?

Guilherme: Não, nós nos separamos há muito tempo. Na verdade, na época, passamos para o sucesso do cliente e criamos um comitê para apresentar ideias e especificações para o produto, mas, mais tarde, ele se tornou parte do produto de engenharia e, agora, foi dividido novamente entre engenharia e produto.

Jeroen: E esse comitê de que você está falando, quem faz parte dele?

Guilherme: No início, o engenheiro era o Bruno, eu era o responsável pelo sucesso do cliente e o marketing, porque estávamos vendendo um produto de marketing.

Jeroen: Entendi. Então você envolve a equipe de marketing nas decisões sobre produtos no RD Station?

Guilherme: Claro. Na verdade, por um longo período, fomos nosso cliente mais avançado.

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: Então, se você deixou de ser seu próprio personagem para não ser mais, isso mudou a maneira como vocês trabalham?

Guilherme: Bem, isso basicamente mudou a maneira como a equipe de produtos trabalha. Então, quando eles pensavam em trabalhar em um novo recurso ou melhorar um determinado recurso, a primeira coisa que faziam era ir até a equipe de marketing e perguntar a eles quais eram os pontos problemáticos, quem estava usando esses recursos, o feedback deles e todas essas coisas. Eles ainda fazem isso, mas é mais como uma recomendação. Agora, o que eles fazem é entrevistar um grupo de clientes que represente melhor a persona mais comum que temos.

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’.

Portanto, nossos clientes precisam de mais conhecimento. Quanto mais eles souberem, mais usarão nosso 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 exemplo, o marco de sucesso um é o que tentamos alcançar durante o período de integração. Por isso, vendemos um pacote de integração para que seja vinculado a ele. E, depois disso, a DCSM ajudará os clientes a seguir o caminho e superar cada um desses diferentes marcos.

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: Então, quais são algumas das coisas nas quais você gradualmente passou a dedicar mais tempo?

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.

Em seguida, passo algum tempo com a equipe de gerenciamento do sucesso do cliente para ajudá-la a receber o resultado do cliente, a implementação e a criação de uma metodologia operacional muito rigorosa, na qual ela acelerará o crescimento e o sucesso do cliente por meio de pontos de contato orquestrados e proativos.

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.

E eles precisam fazer isso em escala. Portanto, eles precisam fazer essa chamada de uma hora para todos os clientes. Construir essa operação é algo realmente difícil. São necessários sistemas muito bons e painéis de controle de processos, painéis de controle individuais, avaliação de desempenho, tendo em vista a caça ilegal e todas essas coisas. Portanto, passo a maior parte do tempo pensando em como traduzir essa estratégia em algo tático e trabalhando com os líderes de cada equipe para personalizar ou orquestrar tudo isso.

Jeroen: Parece ser um grande desafio.

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

Jeroen: Sim, com uma mentalidade de processo. Então, quantas horas você trabalha no RD Station todos os dias?

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 cedo, como às 10 da noite, para que eu possa ter pelo menos sete a oito horas de sono reparador. E, é claro, às vezes há um terceiro momento do jogo que é durante a noite. Se algo precisa ser feito para o dia seguinte, eu trabalho mais uma ou duas horas durante a noite.

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: Legal. Essa parece ser uma rotina e tanto.

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: Legal. Última pergunta: se você tivesse que começar tudo de novo com o RD Station, o que teria feito de diferente? Essa é a pergunta mais 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.

Portanto, eu pensaria no sucesso não como arte, mas como ciência e em 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.

Portanto, essas são, obviamente, as coisas que eu teria feito de forma diferente. Pensando a partir de uma perspectiva de sucesso do cliente.

Jeroen: Sim. Mais processos, mais foco e mais sistema.

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

Jeroen: Legal. Obrigado por seu conselho e obrigado, Guilherme, por participar do Founder Coffee.

Guilherme: Obrigado também. Foi um prazer conversar com você e estar aqui.

—

Enjoyed it? Read Founder Coffee interviews with other founders. ☕

—

Esperamos que você tenha gostado deste episódio.

Se você o fez, avalie-nos no iTunes!

—

Para obter mais informações importantes sobre startups, crescimento e vendas

👉 subscribe here

👉 siga @salesflare em Twitter ou Facebook

Jeroen Corthout
Últimos posts por Jeroen Corthout (exibir todos)