✅ From reluctant founder to $2B valuation: The story of Persona | Rick Song (Co-founder and CEO)

From reluctant founder to $2B …–In Depth – Apple Podcasts
attributes of good businesses

Summary

• Core believe that founder always have to be engaged in sales. Always understand what what customers problems are. Translate those into product. founder-led-sales customer discovery
• Consultative type of selling and SaaS. He spoke very interestingly about how, in order to sell his product, he actually offered a custom software development service tailored to the client's needs. enterprise sales strategy
• There are three types of businesses: 1. brand new technology (Cursor) 2. compete against giant (Figma, Notion) 3. Legacy space out-execute strategy new business
• Clay their overnight success actually took six years of constant iteration, product discovery, and technological/cultural foundation-building before they suddenly found product-market fit customer discovery

“It seems like one of the dreams in building a software business is if you can be your customer's trusted confidant in and around your space and that they're constantly coming, when they think of a problem, they think of coming to you with that problem and that's sort of how you get NRR that's sort of top in class, I think. I think that's definitely the dream, but I think in practice, the hardest part of that is the connection back to engineering and product and design, like the culture to support such a thing. Cause like, if a customer comes to you and they're like, hey, this is a burning problem. Effectively, what that means is yeah, the roadmap we had, ignore that, that's gone, right?”

“And those three categories is either number one, it's a brand new technology, and you're going to just compete with every other company trying to figure out how to like, you know, like, you know, take advantage of this technology. I mean, AI was this, there was blockchain prior to that. And I mean, for AI, there are so no matter how you look at an application of agent, no matter how insane, there is someone else also doing it. And they are just as eager, just as excited, working just as hard. I mean, I hear how hard some of these AI companies are working now. And it's crazy. I mean, they are, it is so, so, so competitive. And you see all of them kind of going at it. We saw the same kind of emerging blockchains. There's so much talent. The second kind of category, I think, that you have to go down. Figma is my favorite example of this. It's a company in which you effectively compete against a giant that just, it seems insane to compete against that giant. To me, it would be like saying, I'm going to redo Google Docs or beat Microsoft their own game. And there are a couple of companies that have that.
Notion's done that, Figma's done that, in which it's a huge up-front investment. And you're going to go on that journey and believe that with your under-resourced kind of product, you will be able to eventually take on something that has infinite more resources than you. And that's a really tough game because I think it's like, usually those type of products, it requires like four or five here, kind of like heads down, sabbatical kind of thing. You'll go at it. I think the third category is the category we're in, which is a legacy space in which there's a bunch of competitors, so many competitors. Everyone's still been at it for a long time and you will out execute. But the underlying theme for all of these, the execution has become more important than ever and it's not so much about like idea discovery or like untapped market discovery anymore. It's just a question of pick your poison on how difficult it will be, but I think every space now is really challenging.

What does execution mean? Like, I feel like it's a[…]”

“So I met with Kareem from Clay yesterday and we both isolate on one thing because I actually asked him for some advice too because I think Kareem's journey is truly, truly incredible. And like, you know, just to give a recap of it, Clay, I mean, right before we were talking, like they didn't start off with the product they have now. And unlike for many other startups, they went through constant iteration, a lot of discovery before they finally, like just overnight found like the fit and it all worked out. But like even all the technology, there are a lot of things they built plus like the cultural learnings and everything that took, I mean, six years plus probably like laid a foundation there. When I asked Kareem at that point, like, don't you get through it? Like that seems insane.”

✅ Focus is the ultimate growth lever

focus growth strategy attributes of good businesses

Deep research on the topic: ChatGPT - Focus as Growth Lever

✅ From Lenny's Podcast: Product | Growth | Career: How have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want? | Jerry Colonna (CEO of Reboot, executive coach, former VC), May 8, 2025

https://podcasts.apple.com/pl/podcast/lennys-podcast-product-growth-career/id1627920305?i=1000706795176&r=1061

“So let's take a step back. The fear is, if I can reflect back to your original question, the fear is, if I go there, I don't know what's going to happen as a consequence of that. Right?

If I pause and ask myself, is this relationship working out for me? I might end up leaving this relationship. If I pause and ask myself, if this career isn't working for me, I might leave my career.

And the good news, bad news is, that's true. That is absolutely true. And if we look at some of the other observations we were making before, like anxiety and depression, we have this belief system that if I pay no attention to the thing that I'm afraid of, it's somehow going to magically go away. If we pay no attention to the source of discomfort, it's somehow going to go away. And that's not actually how life works. More often than not, what we do is we respond to the source of challenge, whether it's discomfort in our relationship, whether it's a discomfort in the way my life has unfolded.” wellbeeing beeing afraid discomfort

✅ 442: Prodoscore: Creating a New SaaS Category No One Asked For - with Sam Naficy

442: Prodoscore: Creating a Ne…–The SaaS Podcast - SaaS, Startups, Growth Hacking & Entrepreneurship – Apple Podcasts
case study

• Narrow ICP focus (his previous business as an example)
• Selling by telling stories sales story objections
• For C-suite send weekly reports timecamp-to-do
• They have all standard marketing/sales - SEO, outbound, cold calls, content marketing, PR go to market
• Employee engagement/disagement - attraction risk - We are able 90 days before employee with 90% certainty they will exit timecamp-to-do
  • Burnout
  • Checkout
  • We are able 90 days before employee with 90% certaintinty they will attrite
  • To potencial attriction (leaving, or other thing like child is sick) - motivate engage or exit him

We do none of that. And that was Chris' brilliance, our founders' brilliance, was that this has nothing to do with clicks and big brother and surveillance. We're only capturing the APIs of cloud tools. If you've got Spotify in the background and listening to music, we don't care, right? If you've got a YouTube channel and you're meditating, none of our business. We're only capturing data that is consigned to your corporate email.

So I see what Sam does. I have, when I wake up in the morning, I have in my dashboard AI driven indicated actions for my day. How do I work my day to day to be more productive? How do I compare to my peers in the exact same role? So we bucket employees in the same exact peer group, sales, marketing, customer success, developers, engineers, and we compare them against their peers and give them next indicated actions of how they can improve.

Look at its base, it provided simple visibility to what the employees were doing, right? Visibility into, remember, we're connecting through the APIs, we're capturing all the activity in email, Slack, CRM, calendar, chat, LinkedIn Navigator, DocuSign, very, very basic stuff. And what has evolved, I mean, the transformation of the product in the last 12 months has been remarkable, let alone the last three years. Part of it is just the AI engine we've built and large language models that are curated and specific[…]”

But at the same time, what was the reaction from employees with those early customers? Because it feels like, whether they understand it or not, it feels like there's some kind of surveillance going on. And employees can be very good at sabotaging new projects if they really want to, right?
So, what was the reaction and was it overall neutral, positive, negative?
Absolutely. Initially, there was pushback. There was pushback from the employees concerned that this is Big Brother, this is surveillance.
And again, I go back 20 years ago, 25 years ago, to that young little young Sam of 27 years old, however old I was. I remember vividly, vividly, employees pushing back, franchisees and owners of these restaurants coming to us and say, oh my God, I can't do this. I love my employees.”

My cousin works here. My uncle works here. Don't bother us. And that story changed. If we are able to save the employee from an issue. So, this was our story, for example, and this obviously presented itself. If a customer comes in and gives you a $20 bill and demands $100 in change, starts screaming at the employee, right? Well, you have video analytics around that. The employee is exonerated there, right? The employee and that those kinds of stories became the groundswell that the next year when we went to a conference, franchisees would run to us. We need this. I'm opening two new stores immediately.

We went from zero customers to 90,000 locations. Subway worldwide deployed the solution. Worldwide, every store around the world.”

If we can empower employees to make the most out of their day and for themselves and for the employer, why not have a win-win? And I'll end with this. Our motto is this, provide flexibility with accountability. If we're allowing a hybrid remote workforce and allowing the employee to be at home at a Starbucks or whatever venue they choose, hey, we'll give you that flexibility. Give me some accountability. What better way to have that win-win solution and dynamic than a tool like Prodoscore?”

C-suite is most likely not going to be in the product. What we do for the C-suite is provide a weekly report. In that summary report says these seven people are at risk of attrition. These six people are not using the cloud tools. We are spending $1200 a month for each employee.

These six people are on excessive meetings. For example, I want my inside salespeople to have 90 percent of their meetings externally. If my inside salespeople have half their meetings internal, there is a problem, my friend. They're not selling. I don't want them to be on calls with marketing and with customer success. They got to do outbound. So we provided those and highlight those for the C-suite. So that's how we kind of bifurcate the utility of the product because as you said, it could be overwhelming. Overwhelming, right?