• [1:18] Why do you feel so strongly about this vision of creating friendships between customers and agents and where does this vision come from?
• [7:28] As a company, what was the process you undertook to define the category that you want to be in?
• [19:29] How do you convince your customers to switch from an established vendor?
• [24:27] What are some of the mistakes you have made in your early days? And what are your biggest learnings in this journey?
• [27:20] What strategies worked for you to get your first 10, 100 and 500 customers?
• [32:03] What advice would you give entrepreneurs on how to scale pre-series A?
• [33:08] What do you think of brand building and its effect on different aspects of the company in various stages?

Links:

Dixa

Books:

The Hard thing about hard things by Ben Horowitz

On Veriff

• [01:20] Could you tell a little about how and why you started Veriff?
• [03:53] What shortcoming did you notice in the current solution that made you think you could do something different and better than what existed?
• [6:42] How are fintech companies with their legacy systems able to use your new advanced verification system?

Growing your business

• [8:20]How did you go to your first ten to hundred customers? What did you prioritize in those initial stages? 
• [12:38] How did you do employer branding to attract good talent from all over the world?
• [14:10] So far what are you most proud of doing in how you’ve built Veriff?
• [15:30] How do you hire at Veriff?
• [17:16] In hindsight, what would you do differently? 
• [19:00] What helped you secure funding from people like the founder of TransferWise to tier 1 investors like Accel, beyond the basics?
• [23:11] What motivates you? Did you always have an entrepreneurial streak or did you fall into this? 

Links:

Veriff

Books:

The Little Prince

• [2:02] - What led you to start Greyparrot and what did you do in your early stage?
• [10:47] - How did you figure out who your buyer in the value chain is?
• [12:17] - What was your process for validating the problem statement?  What did you do well and what could you do better?
• [20:19] - How did you fund the venture in the early stages?  What was your funding journey like?
• [25:39] - How did you find your first few customers, beyond your network?
• [29:28] - What are you most proud of accomplishing thus far?
• [30:33] - How did you deal with any self-doubt and overall stress?
• [33:00] - What are some steps you have taken to keep the business going as you take time to have a baby? What advice would you give to others

Links

Greyparrot.ai

Books:

Donut Economics by Kate Raworth

• [1:22] What is the pain that Outfunnel is trying to solve and who is your target market?
• [3:28] Can you tell me a little about your journey to starting Outfunnel?
• [4:30] How did you validate the problem you were solving?
• [8:03] How did you determine if the problem is a feature or something you can build a business around?
• [9:22] What are the challenges you’re facing in entering a mature market?
• [10:12] How did you get the first 500 customers?
• [15:51] From a sales perspective, what should founders do to help scale the pipeline and create a more scalable business?
• [18:53] What do you think are the key metrics to track for marketing and sales alignment?
• [25:13] How did you come up with pricing for Outfunnel?
• [26:11] How do you work with large platforms?

Links

Outfunnel

Book recommendation:

Alchemy by Rory Sutherland

• [1:40] What about your experience working in the Japanese geriatric residential made you start Farewill?
• [06:15] What is the current experience for consumers who want a Will, probate, or funeral service?
• [14:12] How did you build trust in this industry and get your first few customers?
• [17:46] What impact has Farewill made on customers?
• [22:20] How did Farewill manage to become the number 1 Will provider in UK? 
• [26:43] How do you market a product for the death industry?
• [28:45] How has the pandemic changed the perception of death related services?
• [31:15] What do you look for in hiring and building culture at Farewill?
• [36:22] What are you most worried about in terms of risk to your growth?

Links

Book recommendation: Jonathan Livingston Seagull

• [1:34] - Why did you leave Oracle to join Celonis?
• [3:20]] What does Celonis do? And what is Execution Management System (EMS)?
• [8:00] How would you describe what it takes to be an ecosystem strategy officer?
• [9:35] When time is best to build a partner or ecosystem strategy? Is this something that you would recommend all companies to do?
• [14:13] What is the blueprint to building a successful ecosystem strategy that would scale?
• [19:26] When is the right time to think about embarking on a partnership and ecosystem strategy in the life of a startup?
• [23:21] What advice would you give founders and CEOs on how to measure, track and incentivize the ecosystem strategy role for it to be successful?
• [27:53] What are some of the innovative things that you and Celonis have done to create successful ecosystem strategies?
• [28:48] Do you worry that to get value out of Celonis, companies might have to spend more?

Links:

Celonis

• [1:10] Andy’s background and how he came to be known as ‘the growth guy’. 
• [3:20] What does ‘growth’ actually mean these days? What is expected of a person when hired as VP of growth?
• [6:17] How should a growth team be structured in a startup for it to be set up for success?
• [9:56] Typically, what are a growth team’s responsibilities? What KPIs would one use to measure this team’s success?
• [13:54] When is the right time to hire someone that’s going to coordinate or lead this growth function? What should one look for when hiring such a person?
• [21:38] Are there differences in how startups in Europe think about growth versus startups in other parts of the world?
• [24:10] Is ‘growth’ a temporary function meant to fix something and leave? Or does it have the potential to build a sustainable growth loop?
• [28:18] What is Facebook’s philosophy on growth and how did they structure the growth function within the organisation?
• [31:55] Can someone be trained for growth marketing? What are your insights on recruiting a ‘growth person’? 
• [35:21] - Advice on building a growth team and additional resources.

Resources on growth marketing

Reforge

Traction

Growth hacker marketing

• [01:05] Your journey to starting Pegafund 
• [06:27] What problems do you solve for startups and scale-ups?
• [10:07] What are the key KPIs for SaaS companies in the early stages (zero to 1 million) and what does ‘good’ looks like at this stage. 
• [18:07] What are some of the key metrics for the stage from two or five million to ten million? And also, what are some common mistakes that entrepreneurs make at this stage?
• [23:20] What are the systems that should be in place for tracking from zero to five million - and further - for entrepreneurs and founders to make decisions on?
• [25:46] When revenue operations should be brought in?
• [27:50] Are there specific metrics that help determine when expansion is right? What advice do you have for expanding within Europe versus expanding to the US based on metrics or best practices?
• [32:09] From a metrics perspective, how do VCs view European companies as opposed to US companies?
• [38:31] What are some of the biggest mistakes that start-ups make when they’re preparing for fundraising?

Links:

Pegafund

• [1:14] What is positioning? And how can you tell if a company needs to rethink its positioning?
• [5:12] How does company positioning and product positioning differ?
• [12:00] How does the “Obviously Awesome” positioning framework for B2B companies work?
• [21:08] - Who should be involved in positioning?  April uses her framework to walk through a case study where she developed the positioning for a CRM product.
• [32:45 - How do you balance where you are today with the product against where you want to be? How do you position your product in that context?
• [34:23] When should you create a new category?
• [42:40] Where do companies and founders struggle the most when it comes to positioning and what is your advice for them?

• [01:13] - What is customer success and what is it not?
• [06:32] - How do you align an organization to make customer success everyone’s business? 
• [19:20] - When is the right time to introduce usage telemetry and analytics in an organization?
• [20:58] - How do you hire the customer success leader?
• [25:13] - What should your customer success organization should be based upon? [26:55] - How do you set up Customer success metrics or incentive system?
• [31:33] - How do you structure CS teams to align with the farming/account expansion vs purely engagement and customer satisfaction?
• [37:15] - What are the common mistakes companies make when it comes to customer success?

Links:

Rav Dhaliwal

Rav’s blog on Medium

Resources recommended

The InSide Scoop - Podcast on tools and technology

Creating Customer Success - Podcast by Daniel Cattini and Alex Truman

Customer Success - Book by Dan Steinman, Nick Mehta and Lincoln Murphy