399: LeanData: Overcoming New Category Challenges to 8-Figures

Omar Khan
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS podcast. I'm your host Omar Khan, and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business. In this episode, I took to Evan Liang, the co founder and CEO of Lendata, a platform that helps revenue teams manage all go to market motions in 2012, while@caring.com comma, Evan faced challenges integrating their CRM and marketing automation systems. He built an internal solution to address the pain, which sparked the idea for a startup and eventually led to Evan launching Lean data. He brought on a technical co founder, Kelvin, and as a former venture capitalist, Evan was able to raise funding before they even had a product.

Evan Liang
While raising money was relatively easy, finding product market fit proved to be a lot tougher as the solo salesperson Evan signed Lean Data's 1st 20 or so customers by selling the pain of dirty CRM data rather than some complete end to end solution. Despite the early traction, growth was painfully slow. As a new category created, the founders struggled to educate prospects and closed deals, and some sales cycles stretched for up to three years, from initial interest to purchase. To make matters worse, traditional marketing channels like paid search failed to deliver results, which forced the founders to get creative. They eventually found success by attending events and meetups to connect with early adopters.

On top of all of that, the founders also faced severe pressure from their investors, who expected faster growth. But Evan held his ground, learning to balance his board's expectation with the realities of creating a new category. Today, Lean Data serves over 1000 customers, generates eight figures in ARR, and has raised $42 million in funding. In this episode, you'll learn how Evan navigated the challenges of educating the market and the long sales cycles that come with category creation. Why getting investors aligned with your company's growth trajectory is critical for managing expectations how focusing on customer success and turning users into champions became a key growth engine for lean data.

We talk about why Evan initially struggled with paid marketing channels and how he creatively adapted to reach early adopters, and how Evan evolved Lean Data's product and pricing to benefit customer needs and the market opportunity. So I hope you enjoy it. There's a world where your CRM is powerful, easily configured and deeply intuitive. Attio makes that a reality. Attio is built specifically for the next generation of companies.

Omar Khan
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Head over to SaaS Club IO newsletter and join over 4000 other SaaS founders and entrepreneurs who are already using these insights to grow their businesses. Subscribe to the SaaS Club newsletter today and get the support you need to keep moving forward on your SaaS journey. All right, Evan, welcome to the show. Thank you. Excited to be here.

Do you have a favorite quote, something that inspires or motivates you or just gets you out of bed in the mornings that you can share with us? Yeah, so one of the bosses I used to work with in the venture capital industry used to always greet people like, how are you doing? He'd be saying, just living the dream, you know. And I think that really applies to kind of my model for every day is, you know, even on the most challenging days, being an entrepreneur, I got to remember, this is what I really wanted, is to be an entrepreneur. And I just live up to that, that I just remember that I'm doing exactly what I love doing.

Kelvin
And on the challenging day, that's why I'm doing this job, is to be able to make a difference and have the feeling that I can make a difference. And so for me, that would be the quote that sums up how I think about approaching each day. I love that I should steal that. That's a great way. It's just like it gets you in a good frame of mind even on those days when you don't feel that great.

Omar Khan
Okay, so tell us about lean data. What does the product do? Who's it for? And what's the main problem you're helping to solve. Yeah.

Kelvin
So lean data is built for your rev ops team or your sales ops and mark ops teams. And we really sit between your marketing systems or we take marketing leads or marketing signals and we make sure that it gets to the right salesperson for the sales follow up. So it's kind of an interesting part that we kind of sit within your margin marketing and sales to tech stack and kind of sit in between and do this thing called matching and routing or what we call revenue orchestration. The best example is since this audience is b two b SaaS all, you all have kind of a contact us form on your website. We make sure that after someone fills that out, it gets to the right person.

And it sounds easy, but it's actually more complicated as people scale. For example, if an existing customer comes to your website, you want to get that to an AM or a CSM. If it's an open opportunity, you want to get that to an AE. And if it's a brand new account, you want to get that to an SDR. So lean out is the system that figures that out for you.

Omar Khan
Great. And can you give us a sense of the size of the business where you, in terms of revenue, customers, size of team? Yeah, so we were the pioneers in this space. So we're a little bit over 1000 enterprise customers. Many of the brand names of companies you've heard out there like Nvidia, Google, Snowflake, et cetera.

Kelvin
And then I think about the journey, zero to one, one to 1010 to 100. I would say that we're in that journey between ten to 100 million. Halfway through that. Great. I think you've raised just a little over 42 million.

That's correct. Excellent. Okay, so let's go back to 2012. I think when you founded the business, where did the idea come from? Yeah, so it was mostly personal pain points, like a lot of our entrepreneur story.

My last company had an inside sales team. We're using Salesforce and we were bringing in marketing automations. And as we were stitching those systems together, we ran into a lot of problems with data and processes that made it hard for us to get the full value. And so for me, having that pain points was when the light bulb moment went off that, hey, a lot of companies are going to struggle with this. As CRM went from a data silo to integrated systems, if you don't get your data and processes correct, you're not going to get the full value out of your tech stack.

So if a company could help people solve that make sales and marketing teams more efficient using better data and processes. We thought we could build a pretty interesting company. So that was the initial genesis from a pain point. We're still doing that today, although how we do that has certainly iterated and changed over years. Great, so it was you and your co founder, Kelvin.

Omar Khan
And so you have this idea of this personal pain, very common situation. What did you do? How long did it take you to get to the point where you went from idea to let's actually jump in with both feet and get started? Yeah, so I'd say I started solving the pain in my last company, carrying.com dot. We built some internal systems.

Kelvin
I had basically ops, like an engineering team. So we actually solved it there. Really core solving was a lot of things around matching technology, so fuzzy matching, and then it was probably like nine months later was like, hey, I really enjoyed solving that problem. I wonder if that's an actual business. So then spinning out to do that, and then the main thing was finding my technical co founder, Calvin, someone who I could trust and believe in.

We actually signed up our first few customers fairly easily. So I went out and did the sales process primarily through connections. So we got beta customers from folks who were just like, hey, do you have dirty, dirty data in your salesforce instance? And a lot of people be like, yeah, how are you? Can you sell me?

Solve that? So just around a specific notion around. Initially what we solved was, again, this thing around fuzzy matching. Back then, people thought of the email address as a unique identifier. That's how they were doing it.

We're like, wait a second. No, everyone has gmails back then. Hotmails, yahoos. This is very, very inaccurate. We found a way to make those matchings to find the right people.

That was the core ip initially to get the initial set of customers interested in working with us to have better fidelity around identity recognition. There's a space dedupe and data quality. Yeah, it sounds like the product was very different when you started out to what you just described lean data as today. And I think many times founders are starting out on that journey and they maybe have a big vision. I don't know how big your vision was at the time, but often when you go back and you sort of dig into the story like we're doing with yours, you realize it was a pretty specific problem you were going out to solve rather than we're going to revolutionize how you're running rev ops or whatever.

Omar Khan
We were talking earlier, I think you said you went out and got the first 20 or so customers yourself? That's correct. Did you have any background in sales? Have you done anything like that before? No, I hadn't had a background in sales.

Kelvin
I previously actually been a VC, so I've been on the dark side through that. I did have connections so I could get friendly introductions to people either folks that I known, obviously. I was also able to raise venture funding really early, so there were friendly portfolio companies and stuff like that that I could reach out to. But it was but you still had to sell yourself. So back then, I think we were selling the pain, not really a solution.

So we're selling, hey, do you challenges with with, like I said, dirty data or processes that weren't and there's a lot of pain there still is today. And so people were eager to be like, okay, well, fine. And then how do you do that? And so that's where that having us key, like IP or again, the ip for us was initially this matching technology, which is still part of our overall solution. That's kind of core about solving one data problem that other people didn't think that was Beyle solid.

And that gets your foot in the door to start working with customers. And towards your point around how do we evolve? It was mostly about just being very customer oriented, understanding your customer pain point, and evolving with them. So that's how we kind of came to where we are. And so we had been talking like, hey, how did we get to the next phase of gross it was a couple customers came to us with an interesting problem that they thought we could uniquely solve that didn't exist in the marketplace.

So that's kind of how we didn't took that next leap. For the first 20. It was like, we just want to get access to data, understand people's pain points, and be in a ready state where someone had something that was going to drive towards something broader. We were ready to be there and to understand it. Great.

Omar Khan
I definitely want to dig into that. And what you heard from those customers, just a couple of more questions about getting started. Did you did you go out and like, were you just going out and talking and trying to find people who had these problems before you went out and built the product, or did you sort of do that in parallel based on the fact that you'd already kind of gone through that@caring.com? and you felt like, I kind of know this space well enough, you know? So I say we did the market research in advance and before building the product, so we actually had talked to people around the pain points understanding that they have those things.

Kelvin
And so we around like ten or 15, it was doing informational interviews, so we had a sense of what we were trying to build. And because of my venture background, I was fortunate, and this doesn't apply to all the listeners. We were fortunate to raise money before we actually had a demonstrable product. So the initial scene money came in based on the team. And so then once we had initial set of requirements, then we started building the product.

Omar Khan
So people should try to become a vc first to raise money. I think the broader thing is everyone should play to their own strengths. So I think if you're engineering by training and spending time, building the product isn't a high hurdle. Do that. If you're a great sales guy and you can get people to sign contracts, do that.

Kelvin
And so for me, given my background, having friendlies, I was able to go to folks who I worked with in the past and least willing to bet a certain amount of money just based on, just based on the, on the team itself. So, but I don't think every, every path is different. Do you remember how much you were charging for the product back then with those 1st, 1020 customers? Yeah, no, it was, I think the interesting part is we wanted to build a SaaS business right off the bat. So we were charging kind of like ten to $20,000 kind of on an annual basis.

So that was kind of like, hey, we were going after mostly mid market customers and that's kind of generally the price points that they're willing to pay a budget for tech solutions. Yeah. Especially if you find a problem that's painful enough. Right. That was the key here, that you went, you, you had that personal experience and then you went out there and found the people who had had the same pain.

Omar Khan
And it makes the, you know, obviously the sale a little bit easier than, you know, but I think it got more challenging after that and we'll talk about that. But going from the first ten or 20 customers to the first hundred, you started to do ABM, account based marketing. Can you tell us about that? Why did you take that approach? It's not the first thing that most founders or startups do.

They'll, you know, go out and send cold emails. They'll do a whole bunch of other things. Right, but why was it ABM that worked? Or was it you tried a bunch of things and they didn't work and this is where you landed. Yeah.

Kelvin
So it wasn't, one slight thing is we actually, so ABM actually wasn't around when we were first around until like 2015 or so. So much is that, hey, we initially started off doing the fuzzy matching dedupe space, and two of our early customers came to us, Marketo and Palo Alto networks, and they were like, we want to move toward ABM motion. In order to do that, we need to solve a data problem called lead to account matching. We need to be able to match our leads against our existing accounts in order to understand what accounts we should be marketing against. And so we were able to use our technology to build that foundational lead to account matching technology.

And we actually started helping to evangelize the ABM space. So it wasn't so much we were using ABM internally. It was that ABM as a go to market motion started lifting, was a rising tide that lifted a lot of boats, and we hooked our product onto the ABM wave, and a lot of people became interested in ABM. We went to a marketo conference and we basically said, hey, we're going to sell. Basically, we didn't really have, we had like a core of a product, but we're like, hey, if we solve your lead to account magic, would you be willing to buy?

And actually what was interesting is we wanted to test it out. So we actually lowered the price to $2,500 so that it was just like you swipe a credit card and it was like a simple view and we signed like 60 customers and we're like, okay, we're onto something here. There's actually demand here for people. Granted, it's a low price point, but hey, let's build out a full product that allows people to do lead to account matching at scale. What we had sold at Marketo was basically a widget that you could see inside your salesforce instance on any given account.

All the leads that matched against it. Yeah, great. So for people who don't understand lead to account matching, can you just explain what that is? And more importantly, why was it a pain for those companies? What were they not able to do to run their business effectively?

Yeah, lead to account matching is just basically the idea that, how do I know that a whole bunch of people belong to the same company? So inside your CRM database, it comes in as leads. Leads are free forming objects. They're not associated with anything. And if you want to sell to, let's say like an account like IBM, you probably have thousands of people in your database that have the IBM account, but they're not actually tied to each other.

And so lead to account matching allows you to actually physically tie all those people to a single account. On average. In most mature B two B company's database, 50% to 75% of the leads in their database belong to an existing account. It's just not matched up correctly that way. And that makes it really difficult for you from a sales and marketing perspective to actually target those people if you're not seeing the whole picture of an account.

And so that's why it was a necessary technology as people made that transition to ABM. And presumably some of those email addresses aren't IBM.com email there maybe a Gmail address or something like that? Yeah, or a regular one@IBM.com. and us dot IBM.com are two different domains, but obviously most people would associate that to the same. So you think about acquisitions, you think about different domains and all this other stuff and now you get a sense that hey, it's not so easy.

And generally speaking, people before us, it was like, hey, they would do it by domain. So guess what? There'd be one account that has thousands and thousands of contacts because it's hotmail.com. dot that's a problem. Just explain to us like how did your product solve the problem?

Omar Khan
Like what were you doing? Yeah, so we were known for solving fuzzy matching. So before that we were in the dedupe. So we were matching people with like@leandata.com with at gmail. And so that was just to recognize the same person.

Kelvin
And so when you think about lead account, you needed similar fuzzy matching technology, but at the account level it was. The same solution in many ways with the technology. But you just found another problem that you could go and solve or customers kind of helpfully came to you and told you about it.

Omar Khan
You said you signed up like 60 customers when you made that kind of product available for 2500 over what period. How quickly did you sign those customers? Those were all one conference. We just put out a booth and we just said so. We were just like, hey, we're at this conference.

Kelvin
We lowered the price point and we're just like, hey, we can solve this thing. And it wasn't a revenue goal, it was, and actually that's a good learning. We set more of a customer goal. We wanted to get to 100 customers. I was less concerned about the revenue to prove the product market fit because after that product was just a glimpse into the product.

To actually do it at a database level required probably another year of development. And we want to validate that this was actually the right direction to go in. Okay, wait, so that's a great signal that you're onto something that people really care about and are obviously willing to pay for. Where did you go next? What did you do with the product?

Yeah, so from there, we just kept on building, and I think for us, there wasn't other. We were kind of a pioneer in the category, so we were trying to build out and evangelize around this new space. We didn't know what to call it. The analysts didn't know what to call it. So it was kind of hand to hand, just kind of building up the category and just, again, listening to our customers and trying to add features that they really liked.

And so we went from just a pure lead to account matching technology to understanding what people were using it for. And so one of the pains they had next with account based marketing was they needed to align the right leads, the marketing signal to the right reps, because in an account based motion, you have certain reps that are assigned to these target accounts. And so this was a routing problem. And so we ended up adding a layer of routing technology. On top of that, they were also using this for reporting.

So we were actually also building a reporting feature. The routing feature ended up becoming much more popular, much more sticky and growing. And so over the next few years, it was just about category creation. And then eventually, we kind of broadened out. We started with account base, and then we started realizing that most of our company's customers were only account based.

There were always account based plus channel account base, plus speed to lead account base plus territory. So our products started adding things like round robin territory manage, how do you do, channel partners. And so then we became across multiple go to market motions. So we became a routing solution across any go to market motion, and continue to do that evolution at this new go to market motions. Like today, there's folks moving towards buying groups away from account based marketing.

We continue to work with our customers and continue to service them. Cross any go to market motion. When you signed those 60 customers at the event, where were you in terms of revenue? Were you still, like, below a million ARR, or had you gone past that? Yeah, below a million ARR.

So we had like, 20. Yeah, we were like, we were probably, like, less than, like 100,000 in ar, so. Wow, okay. And then the event was great. What did you do?

Omar Khan
What helped you get to that first million? Like, did you start doing more events and just say, let's just repeat this? Yeah. So I think events have always been important for lean data, and for us, it was really around, hey, standing up some of these customers, then we started signing some bigger customers, right? So some of these initial enterprises, like that price point was a cheap widget that we could sell to prove it.

Kelvin
And then we started working with some deeper enterprise customers. So then they start signing some six figure deals. So that certainly helps you get to a million a lot faster. But for us, in terms of, from our marketing activities, we'd always found that because we had a solution that no one else had heard of, it helped to be face to face. And what helped most is if we could bring a customer to the same place as a prospect.

So what always worked for us better is our customer selling on our behalf, because they always, and this is even still true today. I host dinners and a customer was just like raving about us and the crossbar, like, man, how much are you paying this person? He's like a raving advertisement. I don't have to say anything. I just sit there and I'm like, yeah, so, you know, what's better than hearing it from an employee or sales rep is way better hearing from a fellow customer.

Usually, if it especially helps this customer they company, they respect. Right? So that's the best way. So for us, that's why events work really well. And we tend to go to events that our customers are speaking at or already at, because then we can just ride those code waves and just be like, hey, you heard them, they use us.

And you could talk to them and they almost, in some respects, help you sell. And that's that kind of peer to peer validation that's so much more important, and it's really important to category. They're like, I wasn't looking for this. I didn't know this could be done right. That's really, really helpful when you're doing something new that people hadn't thought of, that validation that it can be done when it's possible to, how powerful it is, is really important to get someone over the humping.

Oftentimes there's no budget line item. Right? Yeah. Well, let's talk about that, the whole kind of idea of a new category. Can you maybe help us explain, explain to us what the challenges were, what the struggle was in being able to help prospects understand what exactly you did, and maybe compare that to the Zoom example we were talking about earlier.

Yeah. So I think it starts with, what's the elevator pitch? It's really hard to explain it to folks because no one's ever heard of it beforehand when we're using the zoom. When Zoom came along, they were just able to say, hey, we're like webex, but we actually work and we're cheaper. People have another product, something in mind that they compare it to.

When you're doing this category creation thing, people don't have that context. One, they don't know it's possible, so they don't even know that they're not even looking for it. An analyst, Craig Rosenberg at Topo, used to describe us as like, we're like pain medication for back pain. A lot of people have back pain, but they don't even try to solve it. They don't even know there's medicine.

But once you take the medicine, you'll never go back because it's kind of life altering, but people just live with it. So that's kind of most of our prospects. When we approach them, we're like, oh, yeah, I have that problem, but I didn't thought of that, that there was a solution for it. And so oftentimes one of the big challenges is I have to sell someone three times. The first time we have to explain what it is, and there's like blown away.

No idea. Didn't know I was a second time, they'd be like, oh, yeah, I get it now. The third time, they usually buy it and they're like, I wish I bought you the first time. We're like, yes, that's the story we hear. Somebody says, but it takes almost three sales cycles.

So one of the big pain was it's just slower. Like, it just takes longer. It's more educational, and you have to spend that time getting to know people, and they're not going to get it on that first try. And therefore that kind of impacts your growth rates, right? You're not going to grow like some of these companies that can grow very, very fast.

Like a zoom. During the pandemic, it was just, people knew the problem and it was slightly better, and they're willing to move over and dope. Those adoption curves just may take a little bit longer. And you have to have the patience and you also just have to have the wherewithal to kind of survive long enough in order to capture it. If you, you know, if you go too fast and blow your Runway away, you're not going to be the one to reap the rewards.

Omar Khan
You said you had to meet with them three times before you could close the sale. How long was that taking? Like, was this, like, oh, three weeks later you're closing the deal. No, that's usually like three years now. There's some customers who buy in year one, so.

Kelvin
But it is funny, like we will sign logos. Many years ago, there's number of customer logos. I had like a top 50 list of, like, companies that under my ecosystem that I wanted to sign. And it would be like four or five years later, we're like, oh, we finally got that one. And I was like, yeah, we've been talking to them a long time and I'm glad they finally came around.

But it is, but we, but, yes. Just help us understand why it was taking that long. And when you describe that, I think about, okay, first of all, you said something very insightful earlier where you talked about selling the pain, and many founders go in and they'll start immediately talking about the benefits we deliver and how this product does XYZ and whatever. But if the person listening to you doesn't even get the pain, none of that is going to register. And especially when you're going through something like this as a new product, new category, it seems like there's quite a lot of education that you need to do there.

Omar Khan
And then also, you also touched on budgets that, you know, it wasn't something they were budgeting for. So did you find that okay eventually when you got to the point, to a point where they said, okay, yeah, I get this, I have this pain. I didn't realize I could solve this. And then it was like, well, we don't have the budget for this, or were they like, this is, I get it now, and we're going to go and reallocate some budget and find some money for this. Or it was like, come back next year.

Kelvin
Yeah. So I think generally speaking, you oftentimes in the first cycle, they do get the pain, right? So you can, that's where you start with is like, hey, did you, do you have these pain points around, like I said, legal account matching or your leads aren't going to the right place and most people will be like, yeah, nodding their heads yes, I agree with that. So that's like, kind of your first cycle is to get the, and then that's where you do run into it. They're just like, I wasn't looking for this.

I didn't know I was looking for this solution and I don't have budget for it. And that's where, like year one, usually you're, you're getting like some interest, but they may not be able to pull the trigger. Now, there are some companies, fortunately, you do have to sign someone. There are early adopters. There are people who are internal champions who are able to, they're like, they align with you.

They're willing to try new tech and they'll, they'll push it through. You know, you have these, like rogue champions who are fantastic. You're a true early adopter, but then you have the folks who are a little bit more conservative and they're going to be like, yeah, I can't push it this year. So then the following year, they're like, yeah, we've seen these pain points that you were talking about. Like, hey, now I know I could solve it.

It becomes more obvious in year two that they have these pain points. And then usually at that point in time, I'm going to fight for budget. Maybe they don't get it. And year three, they're like, no, we have this in the budget. I know I want this.

I've got approval and everything of that sort, and they're ready to go. And so that's why it takes a little bit longer for it. But there are customers that go faster, and then there are customers who go slower. And oftentimes there's some customers who are like, yeah, it's not a priority for me or that's not my department, or I'm not willing to fight for that. Right.

And sometimes it takes a different mentality. And this is your classic crossing the chasm. I mean, I've often talked to founders who are sort of at the other side of that. And, and I said, you know, you should be looking for more early adopters here. And often it's like, well, how, how do I know?

Omar Khan
And you went through that process. And so was it more about you were just going out and talking to everybody and then you started to identify these people through conversations or over time, did you figure out these are the types of companies or people and those organizations that we need to reach out to because they're more likely to be an early adopter. Yeah. So I think the interesting thing part is we're talking about events early. So there's communities, early adopters tend to glom together and want to learn from each other.

Kelvin
And so there's these community aspects that you can hone into and find out the pockets of early adopters. And so I talked a little bit about Marketo Summit was really big for us. So we oftentimes one of our guerrilla strategies is we'd go to marketo meetups. And so we go there, and that's where you're going to find bands of early adopters. They're there to learn and they're more eager to do that.

And so, yeah, I think I signed up for market. I knew marketing automation was going to be a space that was going to drive the data. So I believe I signed up for Marketo when there was two of us. So I would just start going to the marketo meetups and I'd go to, hey, that is San Mateo, San Francisco and San Jose. So I went to all three.

And so in those I got a chance to meet them. A lot of those became early customers because they had that mentality of early adopters. As you scale, you just build to other bigger communities. And so that's always been something that's important for lean data. So a long time ago we started Dreamforce is huge, right, Salesforce ecosystem, but it's a huge event.

How do you work that as an early stage startup? And so we banded together with a bunch of other vendors and we started our own little conference called OpStar. So we rented out a restaurant, we brought in folks. We were early in the movement around Rev. Ops brought people together.

So there's ways you can go to places where the early adopters congregate and find ways to capture them. And so today, opstars is the biggest satellite event at Dreamforce. It has like 2000 plus attendees. We rent out the San Francisco mint every year. And so we have, this brand has been going on for eight years around community, but it started with our needs was how do we take the 150,000, 100,000 people who go to Dreamforce and find the ones that are most eager to actually adopt technology and how do we bring them together in an efficient process?

Omar Khan
So we've talked about what worked, how you were able to grow the business. Let's talk about a couple of things that didn't work and you're trying to grow. Yeah. So traditional digital marketing, buying key adwords, did not work for us. It has never, because like I said, people aren't googling and searching for, we're not searching for our technology.

Kelvin
We didn't know what to really call it. We had to make up the name. And so there aren't keywords. Every person I brought in would be like, yeah, we've hit our limit. There's no keywords for this.

I can't even spend more money. So the traditional inbound wasn't the thing because it wasn't something people were necessarily searching for. That's hard because if you have a great inbound digital strategy, it scales quite nicely. Put more dollars in and not being able to do that forces you to be a little bit more creative and that's not as easy and or you just continue to spend money that doesn't. Work, this trying to get adwords to work, was this happening before you were getting more and more effective at converting at events and meetups?

Omar Khan
Or was this in parallel? Timing wise, when was it happening? It was always in parallel. So, I mean, that's one of the first things you do stand up, you start testing out with it. You bring in demandjet experts who know how to do it.

Kelvin
And so that's something that we just has never really worked at. Tremendous scale for us. Now there's a little bit more. So it is part of our strategy, but we've never had that as a flywheel that truly drives that. We've had to be more evangelist in terms of our channels.

Omar Khan
So you mentioned that you went through a few people. Was it like, okay, you've brought somebody on to do adwords and they weren't able to get it to work, and you were like, well, maybe it was the person, maybe I need to try somebody else. And then the next person kind of hits the same problem. Yeah. Once you get to the third or fourth, you're like, okay, it's not the skillset.

Kelvin
There may be something else here. It may just be more the tactic that the strategy may not apply. And sometimes what works out on other company may not work at yours. And so vice versa, what works for us may not work for someone else. I imagine it might be a little scary when you come to that realization that I can't scale by throwing more money here, that is.

Omar Khan
And so, like, you'd raise money, you're trying to grow the business. I'm sure you've got expectations from VC's as well about how quickly you should be growing. Kind of sounds like a nice recipe for, you know, for you to be telling people that you're living the dream a lot more. Fair enough. Yes, I think, yes, it's something a little bit.

Kelvin
Be patient. I do think you have to be trying new things, but I do caution, a lot of times when people come in externally to lean data is, hey, the playbook that works somewhere else may not work here. There are desyncrasy of our market that we just have to adjust with. And so I think that does come with being transparent with your board and making sure you're aligning around it. But I also think sometimes you don't want to keeping up with the Joneses, maybe another phrase that you just got to be careful about it, right?

When everyone's people think money is free growth at all costs, you've got to be a little bit cautious to apply to your own business. And so fortunately, that was one of the things that I think we did do well was we didn't overraise from a capital perspective, we didn't chase valuations. And now that things have adjusted a little bit, post 2021 money is no longer free. We didn't have that overhang, we didn't have a huge burn rate, we didn't have all this capital. And so you have to also be a little bit confident that while everyone else says this works there, you have to have the confidence to sometimes push back and be willing to say, hey, maybe we're different, right.

Doesn't mean we can't learn and potentially do things better. But just because, like I said, just because it works somewhere else doesn't, doesn't mean it works here. Yeah. Can you give us just a sense of what that was like, what kind of pressure you were facing or kind of mentally what you had to deal with when on the one hand you're trying to figure out how to grow and these attempts at things like AdWords is basically failing, you've got VC's who are putting at least have expectations of how quickly you should be growing. And then when earlier we were talking, you were also talking about, and then you're looking out to the market and you're seeing other companies that seem to be growing much faster than you and doing really well and you've got all of these things going on.

Omar Khan
What sort of pressure did you feel from that? Yeah, so I think the main thing is that's where I fortunately was picking investors that I thought were going to support us as a business. And being able to have that transparency with your board is key. So it's about that alignment and making sure that, hey, you can talk through it and as long as they feel that you're. Some VC's won't listen, right.

Kelvin
You know, they'll, they'll fire the CEO and bring someone else in. Fortunately, I had picked folks that I'd known and trust trusted, and we could have that dialogue and they could see that we were doing the right things and they ultimately trusted management to do the right course. And so that's why I think we were able to do that. If you don't have that trust and then I think it's much more difficult. And generally speaking, that's when unfortunately, changes happen, whether you like it or not.

And sometimes I think that's if you pick the wrong investors, not that could happen. Totally. So how did you scale if you're not able to throw a bunch of money to grow faster. You can't be doing, like, millions of these meetups to go and find people, right? So, yeah, so, I mean, I think we had traditionally relied on a kind of SDR outbound.

So we had to outbound or learn how to outbound our way into it. And then the other part of it is, fortunately for us, we did build, we were category, we category creators. We treated our customers really, really well. And so we traditionally have something at a certain point in scale. We had something called customer virality, where we had people who trusted us, recommended us, but also, fortunately, in the tech space, a lot of our early customers, people move around a lot.

So I remember, I think we were at, like, I don't know, like 20 or 30 customers. We were really early on, and there was one month that a bunch of them changed jobs. And I was freaking out. So I was like, oh, my God, that's a huge part of my ar. I'm going to lose the business.

But what ended up happening is we didn't lose any of those customers. They went to somewhere new and brought us in. I was like, oh, wait a second. This is actually a good thing. When people move jobs is actually a good thing if you've built a great product.

And so a lot of us is. We have evangelized. We've built a community of folks who've used our products, who will then bring us into new companies. And today we're at a point of scale where oftentimes we're going after a new account, we'll often have two or three champions land from different departments at different places into the same company. And that, that really kind of makes you, makes it faster for you to do the deal cycle.

We do do things like, we invest a lot in customer marketing. We have a certification program, so we'll certify certified people as leaned out as certified. It's a badge of honor for them, but it also makes it, we will also see certified users retain them better, and when they go somewhere, they're more likely to bring us in. And so we kind of nurture that. And those are ways you can kind of, you know, kind of build that, and as you get bigger, you have more champions, and that builds kind of a natural flywheel in some respects.

Omar Khan
Yeah. So you talked about customers who trust you and having customers who will basically do the selling for you at events and you're not paying them.

Building a great product is one part of that. But when it comes to building that trust and then being able to be willing to advocate for you like that, to be the champion. What did you have to do as founders? Was this about just you as the founders, just going and just building strong relationships with individuals? How did you do that?

Kelvin
Yeah, I mean, the first part is you have to deliver on what you promise. So that's the first part. When you promise someone, I'm going to solve something, you have to first deliver on that. And so that was kind of an odd mantra. I mean, our number one cultural value is customer first.

And so we try to live up to that. And in the early stages, yes, I think as founders and early employees, we spent a lot of time with our customers. Right. We wanted to make sure. I think one of the key things is my CPO, who's been with us for like a decade.

When he first came, I was like, I want to work on product. And I was like, no, you're going to take on customer success. And I was like, he's like, I didn't sign up for that. I was like, no, we only have like ten customers and I need you to know all their pain points because that will drive the product roadmap. And so now we have a different customer success department today.

But at the early stage that you have to be that close to your customers and really be able to do whatever it takes to service them, because that will be driving your insights and that those relationships do matter a lot. If you can deliver for that initial set and have those raving fanatics that kind of build, if you lose that in the early stages, then as well as you can sell or market, it's a leaky bucket, right? You're just not going to get that. Same flywheel and then sort of where the business is today. Where do you see this category happening?

Omar Khan
What's happened in the last ten years? And what do you think the opportunity still is? Yeah, so, absolutely. So we kind of grown with our customers. We've kind of gotten to a current scale.

Kelvin
We rode in the ABM wave. I think there's going to be a new wave of disruption happening around go to markets. I think people went from a lead centric model to an account sector model. Today there is really this big movement around buying groups. Buying groups is the notion that you should be selling opportunities.

And within an account there are certain sets of folks that really, really matter. And I think that's going to be a big disruption in the go to market and lean data. Today is the leader in helping people move to buying groups because of our technology and our way of helping people do the revenue orchestration. And so we're excited to help this next generation. And what's interesting, the previous ABM wave was really driven by tech, early adopters.

This buying groups is really driven by larger enterprises. They have multiple products, multiple skus, multiple geosynthetics. And so for them to take a big company, let's say like an Amazon, they've sold to everyone. Everyone uses Amazon. They even on the B two B enterprise side, right, if you think like web services.

But the question is, how do they get them to buy more? How do they buy more products, etcetera? And that's not about account base. That's going to be around buying groups and selling them more skus and figuring it out. And that's going to be, again, disruptive to a go to market.

So we're very bullish on this wave and we feel very well positioned. We were a small company for the last wave, so we were kind of riding the wave. And this wave, we plan on trying to lead the way. And from a thought leadership perspective, we've written a definitive guide on buying groups, and we're out there espousing and trying to lead the next wave of go to market innovation. Got it.

Omar Khan
So I'm not far from an ABM expert, but when you describe, you sort of said ABM was too broad, leads kind of maybe too narrow, and sort of buying groups in the middle. But at a service level, buying groups don't sound that different to identifying people in a company. So how is that different? It's. So the funny part is, for sales, this is like mapping an account.

Kelvin
This is how they sell. Right. So the best salespeople do this. It's about the systems, data and some of the other groups aligning on that. So that, hey, so with the technology for the long stuff, we just could barely get people names and leads.

It is about the natural sales motion, but making sure your data, processes and systems and your other teams are aligned around delivering around this buying group. So that's the difference is the technology and the processes is finally caught up to how people, the best sales reps, do sell enterprise accounts. Great. Well, we should wrap up here. Let's get onto the lightning round.

Omar Khan
I've got seven quick fire questions for you. All right. What's one of the best pieces of business advice you've received? Yeah, so I think for me it's actually that early on I learned this lesson. It was just, don't run out of cash.

That's a good one. What book would you recommend to our audience? And why. Yeah. So one book I really like for, especially early stages, founder's dilemma.

Kelvin
So it's a book by Harvard Business Review, and it's basically about, hey, everything at the early stage is trade offs. Do you raise venture capital? Do you not? It's a trade off. Do you.

Do you try to be a solo founder or not? It's all about trade offs. So for me, I think that's good for founders to understand that you really, every decision has a consequence, and you need to be thoughtful around each of those early stage decisions. What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder? I think it's a little bit to be able to rise above the noise and to be able to persevere.

And so for me, even when the kind of the shit hits the fan, I try to stay calm and, you know, understand to take the longer term perspective that you got to ride out that store. What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit? This will be not necessarily controversial. I'm inbox zero and have been for 20 years. And the reason I say that, it takes a lot of time to write the emails, but it makes me a lot more flexible and react.

I can react faster. Something and urgent comes in, I can react faster because it's not getting buried and lost. I'm an inbox zero guy, too, so it drives me nuts when I see a scroll bar in the inbox. What's a new crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the time? Yeah.

So I think a lot of the sales of Martech technologies have been around for over two decades. I think, like, I'll even say, like, I think there's a way to make CRM a whole lot better than what it's originally designed for. So I think there, in the next ten years, I think you're going to see some major disruption to how we think about the entire sales and marketing step from beginning to end. Well, what's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know? So I no longer drink, but the fun fact is that was not the case.

And if you talk to someone in college, they would have actually had a very different of me than the person you see today. And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work? Other than my family, I really enjoy playing poker. I just find that to be a strategic thing that I really enjoy. Awesome.

Omar Khan
Thank you so much for joining me, Evan. If people want to check out lean data, they can go to leandata.com. if folks want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that? LinkedIn. So, Evan liability great.

We'll include a link to your LinkedIn profile in the show notes great. Thank you so much for unwrapping the last twelve years for us and sharing your story and the lessons you learned along the way. I appreciate that and I wish you and the team the best of success. Cheers. There's a world where your CRM is powerful, easily configured, and deeply intuitive.

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399: LeanData: Overcoming New Category Challenges to 8-Figures - with Evan Liang

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1. Introduction to LeanData

2. Overcoming Early Challenges

3. Strategic Shifts and Market Education

4. Scaling the Business

5. Future Directions and Insights

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