#TDSU Episode 153:

⏱️ Timestamps:

00:00:00 - Intro

00:01:01 - Building customer success before customers

00:01:43 - Facing the uncharted early-stage startup

00:03:02 - Hiring customer-facing roles early

00:04:49 - Reflections on the evolving role of success

00:06:52 - Challenges of iterating without a market

00:07:23 - The meaning behind Sandgarden

00:08:12 - Being the voice of future customers

00:09:20 - Why product marketing starts sooner than you think

00:10:52 - Reverse engineering the roadmap to success

📺 Lifetime Value: Your Destination for GTM content

Website: https://www.lifetimevaluemedia.com

🤝 Connect with the hosts:

Dillon's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dillonryoung

JP's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeanpierrefrost/

Rob's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rob-zambito/

👋 Connect with Andy Magnusson:

Andy's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andy-magnusson/

[Andy] (0:00 - 0:17)

In a company like this where we're still finding our way to what our final product is even going to look like, finding our way to what our customer base is going to be, what our RICP is going to be, and so on, there's an open question of what can somebody like me even do in that situation?

[Dillon] (0:29 - 0:39)

What's up, lifers, and welcome to The Daily Standup with Lifetime Value where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day. I got my man Rob with us. Rob, you want to say hi?

[Rob] (0:40 - 0:41)

What's up, people?

[Dillon] (0:42 - 0:45)

And we have JP with us. JP, do you want to say hi?

[JP] (0:46 - 0:47)

How are you?

[Dillon] (0:48 - 1:00)

And we have Andy with us. Andy, can you say hi, please? Hey, everybody.

Hello, hello. And I am your host. My name is Dillon Young.

Andy, thank you so much for being here. Can you please introduce yourself?

[Andy] (1:01 - 1:26)

Sure. My name is Andy Magnuson. I am currently the founding customer engineer at a brand new startup called Sandgarden, which is so brand new that we don't really have a product yet.

We're working on it. We don't have customers yet. We're working on it.

And what I'm trying to figure out here at Sandgarden is how a customer-facing support kind of person can add value before we actually have customers.

[Dillon] (1:28 - 1:42)

Okay. Let me get to my last part here. Andy, we ask one single question of every single guest, and that is what is on your mind when it comes to customer success?

Now, rewind. What you just said about what you're trying to figure out, is that what's on your mind right now?

[Andy] (1:43 - 3:01)

That is largely what's on my mind. Yeah. This is the earliest phase startup I've ever joined.

I've joined some pretty early stage startups before, but there's always been a product and there's always been customers. There's always been some kind of a process already for dealing with those customers, for dealing with problems as they come up, getting things resolved quickly, getting feature requests taken care of, et cetera, et cetera. But in a company like this, where we're still finding our way to what our final product is even going to look like, finding our way to what our customer base is going to be, what our RICP is going to be, and so on.

There's an open question of what can somebody like me even do in that situation? And so what I've been trying to figure out is thinking about the company six months down the road, a year down the road, and saying, if I were to join the company now, what would I want there to be in place to help me do my job? And as I figure these things out one at a time, I start building them.

So working on building docs, working with the founders, talking about what do we want the customer experience to look like? Who are we actually going to be trying to sell to? And so on and so forth.

And reverse engineering my way into hopefully having a good process in place and a good foundation for when we actually do have customers that I need help.

[Dillon] (3:02 - 3:43)

I have so many questions and they're competing in my head for priority because I wonder, how did you found this role? I imagine it's somebody you worked with previously, right? And they said, Andy's really, he is top of the heap in the work that he does.

And so I've got to have him on the team. And I also wonder if they have shared with you, and I have to imagine they have, of why they are investing so early in customer engineering or customer success support roles, because that is not the norm, even though we all think it should be. So I'd love if you could explain both of those.

[Andy] (3:44 - 4:28)

Yeah. So to answer your first question, yeah, the founders, two of three of them I worked with at a previous startup. And that was how I got involved with these guys in first place.

And basically when they were going out and looking for just kind of initial funding and then proceed, they ended up with sufficient money that they decided, you know what? We're going to start off by going big. We think we're going to be needing customer facing people.

We're going to be needing marketing, et cetera, et cetera, not today, but a few months down the road. And the people we want to hire are available right now. Let's just hire them and start using some of this money.

Yeah. Again, I've never joined a startup that has so many different functions in place on day one. And it's been a really interesting experience.

[Dillon] (4:31 - 4:48)

Rob, I want to come to you first to talk maybe, or maybe ask questions. I just have so many questions here and I don't know that we have enough information to share opinions necessarily, but Rob, in your unique breadth of experience, what are the questions you want to ask?

[Rob] (4:49 - 5:31)

I'll start out by saying, Andy, I'm very familiar with this position. The best and simultaneously worst experiences of my career were in the situation you're in. Yeah.

So this is almost identical to the situation when I started at Quality as a company that I worked at in 2016. And basically, yeah, it's fine. You can mention it.

But yeah, like I used to just hang out around the office and it was just a bunch of engineers. And eventually the CEO is a friend of mine. He's like, Hey, you want to work here?

I was like, okay. And I had no idea what to do. I didn't know the industry.

I didn't know the product. I didn't know customer success.

[Andy] (5:31 - 5:34)

That's kind of how I got into startups myself. So yeah, I hear you.

[Rob] (5:35 - 6:50)

But I will say, I think your founders are making the right bet by betting on customer success early. But the thing is what you're doing is not really customer success because you don't really have customer outcomes yet. You don't really have customers yet.

So what you're actually doing is I think a masked product marketing role, because you're probably thinking about what are the core value propositions that our product has? Who is our ideal customer profile? What is our pricing strategy?

And I'll tell you what, in many times I actually enjoy that a lot more than I enjoy customer success because one of my favorite engagements I did in the last, I'm a consultant. And one of my favorite engagements I did in the last year, there's a company called Aloft and they were launching their first SaaS product. And they were like, Rob, we want you to help us figure out, not really just like the customer journey, but let's talk about what is our marketing strategy?

How do we think about conferences? And what is our sales strategy? How do we think about value propositions and sales scripting?

And can we afford an AE? And then we can talk about all the product and customer success stuff that comes after that. So it was cool because I got to deal with all the existential questions of the business, which we don't always get to at later stage companies, but it's hard because you're inevitably taking your to-do list and you're not going to get to 90% of it.

[Andy] (6:52 - 7:12)

Yeah, that's pretty much right. And then you have the other interesting thing, which is that we spend months working on something we can show customers, working on something we can show prospects. And then after a couple of demos, okay, back to the drawing board and then we have to start over again.

So there's a lot of going back, a lot of rethinking. It's a very interesting environment to be in.

[Dillon] (7:14 - 7:21)

JP, I know you've never served in a role like this, but maybe what does this make you think about or what questions does this create for you?

[JP] (7:23 - 7:40)

I think one of the things I keep coming back to is even though you don't have customers, even though there's so much that's not built yet, there's already this name, Sandgarden. What's there? What is Sandgarden?

Because I think what do you want people to think? I have no concept of where that even goes.

[Andy] (7:41 - 7:59)

Yeah. We have a clear vision of what we want to build or of what we are building. It's just a question of what's going to finally look like.

But yeah, so Sandgarden is a modularized platform for basically testing, deploying, and iterating on AI apps.

[JP] (7:59 - 7:59)

Sandbox.

[Andy] (8:00 - 8:00)

Sandbox.

[JP] (8:01 - 8:01)

Sandgarden.

[Andy] (8:01 - 8:06)

I got you. Our CEO is a really huge fan of Soundgarden, so I think that's where the name is.

[JP] (8:06 - 8:06)

Okay.

[Andy] (8:06 - 8:09)

I was going to make that reference, but I didn't know.

[Dillon] (8:12 - 8:45)

I guess where my head goes is like product marketing is one way to put it, but this early, it just feels more like, hey, Andy's really smart. He's worked in this particular profession before. We could use his brain to help us spot the obstacles before they show up on the horizon, help us think about how we're building before we hit those obstacles on the horizon.

[Andy] (8:45 - 9:18)

Is it fair to say that's probably? Yeah. I would definitely agree with that.

There's me and there's one other person in the startup whose their background is in sales engineering and in product advocacy, that kind of thing. The two of us are sort of the customer voice before we have customers, because we're the ones who have spent so much time interacting with customers in the past. We have a sense of, okay, this kind of thing, this is going to work for customers or no, this is way too confusing.

This is way too complicated. None of this makes sense, whatever. We're providing some of that early feedback ourselves.

[Dillon] (9:20 - 9:28)

Rob, with the time we have left, I would love to understand why you lean towards product marketing, which to me always feels like it comes later stage.

[Rob] (9:29 - 10:17)

Yeah. So look, I'll just claim this by saying I am not a product marketer and I don't know, I don't know ball when it comes to product marketing. It's the first time I've heard that word.

Yeah. I just made it up. You were here to see it, the advent of product marketing.

No, no. Yeah. I call it that because I've actually been trying to wrap my head a bit more around product marketing.

I've got some friends who are in product marketing and the stuff they're thinking about is value propositions, pricing, go-to-market strategy, and that's early stage stuff. Now, yes, it happens later too, but those are some of the foundational questions that I've run into, even starting with what is the product? If there's any product marketers listening here, they're like, wow, Rob's absolutely bastardizing our industry.

It's going to sound like when our moms try to explain what customer success is.

[Dillon] (10:19 - 10:51)

Andy, we're just about out of time, but is there a way to explain or God, I hate myself for saying this, a framework you're using for how to think about Andy, if you've watched any episodes, that's Rob's favorite word. It's his new middle name is framework, but how do you think about, it's so early for people who are used to dealing with customers. So how do you reframe it in your head and decide what to work on?

[Andy] (10:52 - 11:21)

Mm-hmm. So it's a combination of what the company, i.e. the founders think that we need at this moment. And going back to what I was saying before, sort of reverse engineering, what a person in my position would want there to be a year down the line, six months down the line, whatever.

And whether that's really good documentation or whether that's really established processes or troubleshooting, so on and so forth. And basically whatever is the biggest fire on my horizon at the moment is what I'm working on.

[Dillon] (11:22 - 11:24)

That's gotta be so exciting. So interesting.

[Andy] (11:24 - 11:25)

It's really interesting.

[Dillon] (11:26 - 12:11)

Yeah, man, that's cool. So we are out of time, but Andy, I demand that you come back in another like six months. And because I'm so interested to hear what this journey looks like, what worked, what didn't, what sort of blind spots did you guys, you still miss?

What can we learn from this experience of like, this is the new frontier, man, of having customer facing people that aren't sales, that really in a process. And it's a lot of my theory is that we're just going to see that more and more as you see new companies spun up and they know that they're going to need this eventually, they install it much earlier. And so, oh my God, I feel like Nostradamus right now.

No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. That's too much.

[Andy] (12:11 - 12:17)

I would love to see more places trying this out and I'm really hoping that we're successful with this. So it's a good model for other companies coming forward.

[Dillon] (12:18 - 12:24)

Yeah. So please come back in a couple of months and tell us how it's going. Tell us what has worked and what hasn't.

[Andy] (12:24 - 12:27)

I might lose what little hair I have left on my head.

[Dillon] (12:31 - 12:32)

That's okay. Well, thank you so much, Andy.

[Andy] (12:33 - 12:34)

All right. Thanks for having me guys.

[Voiceover] (12:40 - 13:10)

You've been listening to The Daily Standup by Lifetime Value. Please note that the views expressed in these conversations are attributed only to those individuals on this recording and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of their respective employers. For all inquiries, please reach out via email to Dillon at lifetimevaluemedia.com.

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