Growing Lean

Charting the Rise of De-Select: Antony Lamotte’s Journey from Psychology to MarTech Innovation

April 18, 2024 Ethan Halfhide
Charting the Rise of De-Select: Antony Lamotte’s Journey from Psychology to MarTech Innovation
Growing Lean
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Growing Lean
Charting the Rise of De-Select: Antony Lamotte’s Journey from Psychology to MarTech Innovation
Apr 18, 2024
Ethan Halfhide

Discover the unconventional path Antony Lamotte took from psychology to entrepreneurship as he shares the enthralling tale behind his tech startup, De-Select. Antony's expertise transformed the daunting world of Salesforce Marketing Cloud data management into a user-friendly experience for marketers everywhere. Throughout the episode, we navigate De-Select's journey—from its early bootstrap days to its current flourishing state, discussing the strategic moves that enabled their expansion into the U.S. market, and Antony's own relocation to the tech hub of Austin. He sheds light on the significance of crafting a product that's not just powerful but intuitive and the mastery behind De-Select's go-to-market strategy, which has been a cornerstone of their success.

When it comes to the ripple effects of the pandemic, Antony dissects the contrast between the hurdles and the unexpected financial windfalls faced by tech startups. He details the pivotal shift from a frenetic growth pace to a more sustainable, profitable trajectory and how De-Select has embraced AI to enhance their service offerings. The conversation also turns to the power of customer feedback and the art of leveraging content marketing to not just draw in leads, but to build lasting relationships. Antony's strategies for maintaining customer connections and reusing educational materials for lead generation offer a cache of wisdom for those aiming to thrive in the ever-evolving tech landscape.

The episode caps off with a candid examination of the challenges that lie in the path of scaling a startup. Antony doesn’t shy away from discussing the high personal stakes involved, from relentless work schedules to the critical task of executive recruitment. He emphasizes the importance of delegation for CEOs and keeping a close watch on a variety of KPIs to navigate the fiercely competitive MarTech space. Finally, we delve into De-Select's focus on forming powerful partnerships, highlighting how collaborations with accelerators and consulting firms have been instrumental in carving their niche in a crowded market. Join us for a deep dive into the strategies that have catapulted De-Select to the forefront of marketing tech innovation.

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Have an app idea and dont know where to start? Book a Free Discovery Call Here
Learn more about our award winning app development firm Lean Discovery Group
Connect with me on linkedin

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Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

Discover the unconventional path Antony Lamotte took from psychology to entrepreneurship as he shares the enthralling tale behind his tech startup, De-Select. Antony's expertise transformed the daunting world of Salesforce Marketing Cloud data management into a user-friendly experience for marketers everywhere. Throughout the episode, we navigate De-Select's journey—from its early bootstrap days to its current flourishing state, discussing the strategic moves that enabled their expansion into the U.S. market, and Antony's own relocation to the tech hub of Austin. He sheds light on the significance of crafting a product that's not just powerful but intuitive and the mastery behind De-Select's go-to-market strategy, which has been a cornerstone of their success.

When it comes to the ripple effects of the pandemic, Antony dissects the contrast between the hurdles and the unexpected financial windfalls faced by tech startups. He details the pivotal shift from a frenetic growth pace to a more sustainable, profitable trajectory and how De-Select has embraced AI to enhance their service offerings. The conversation also turns to the power of customer feedback and the art of leveraging content marketing to not just draw in leads, but to build lasting relationships. Antony's strategies for maintaining customer connections and reusing educational materials for lead generation offer a cache of wisdom for those aiming to thrive in the ever-evolving tech landscape.

The episode caps off with a candid examination of the challenges that lie in the path of scaling a startup. Antony doesn’t shy away from discussing the high personal stakes involved, from relentless work schedules to the critical task of executive recruitment. He emphasizes the importance of delegation for CEOs and keeping a close watch on a variety of KPIs to navigate the fiercely competitive MarTech space. Finally, we delve into De-Select's focus on forming powerful partnerships, highlighting how collaborations with accelerators and consulting firms have been instrumental in carving their niche in a crowded market. Join us for a deep dive into the strategies that have catapulted De-Select to the forefront of marketing tech innovation.

Support the Show.

Have an app idea and dont know where to start? Book a Free Discovery Call Here
Learn more about our award winning app development firm Lean Discovery Group
Connect with me on linkedin

Speaker 1:

Hey folks, welcome back to the growing Lean podcast sponsored by Lean Discovery Group, an award-winning app and software development firm based out of Virginia. This is your host, Dylan Burke, also known as Deej, and I'm super happy to be here today with Antony Lamotte, co-founder and CEO at De-Select. Welcome, Antony.

Speaker 2:

Hi Deej, Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, the pleasure is all mine. So, Antony, to get us started, can you tell us a little bit about your background in history and what led you to founding De-Select.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, great question. To start my background, I studied psychology, of all things. I have a master's degree, but I ended up in management consulting and so back in 2018, I was doing marketing automation consulting, typically for enterprise, very focused on Salesforce, and in doing so I saw that marketers were really struggling with how to manage data. So in Salesforce Marketing Cloud it's a very powerful platform, but it can be quite technical platform as well. So if you want to manipulate your data or segment, you're going to have to write SQL queries or find someone who does, and I thought, well, surely we can do something that's a little bit easier. So I had been teaching myself how to code throughout my career.

Speaker 2:

This was not my first startup. I just tried a few other things but me and my co-founder. So I got together with Jonathan, who's now my co-founder and our CTO, and I know him from back in the early days in our career in consulting and we started hacking and we went to market very fast. We can talk more about that and initially we actually bootstrapped till one million in annual recurring revenue. That allowed us to attract attention of some prominent angels. We got an awesome advisory board you can find them on our website and then we also attracted some venture capital, used that money to expand into the US. Side notes were originally a Belgian company. Our HQ is still there, but, as I like to call it, our GTM, our go-to market HQ is here in Austin, where I live now. So I've made the jump across the Atlantic. We got over a dozen people now here as well and still growing pretty good, especially given the current market.

Speaker 1:

Awesome, awesome, amazing. And could you walk us through your overall business strategy for deselect? Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2:

I mean, it's a broad question. I can talk about this stuff for hours. I'll break it down into product and GTM. So on the product side, there's a few pillars that we have adhered to from the very early beginning that we still adhere to and how we think about our products. So those are turnkey, intuitive, fully integrated. So turnkey means you sign with us within 24 hours, you're up and running, you don't have to do a heavy implementation project, so your time to value is almost instantaneous. Maybe some training, a couple of weeks to get used to the tool, but very fast value. Secondly, intuitive this is very, very hard but we will try to make our software as easy to understand as possible. We do offer some training because we solve very complex problems data models, segmentation, marketing strategy, et cetera so we do offer some training around it. But people do comment and leave us really good reviews on things like the Salesforce, app exchange or Capitara or whatever that our stuff is easy to use and then, lastly, fully integrated. So as a design principle for our we call it an MOP marketing optimization platform, which is something we've gradually developed into we want to make sure that it can just plug and play instantly In our case, the Salesforce.

Speaker 2:

Because we're a Salesforce first company, we already support other channels as well. So there's that. So, overall, this whole strategy, where is it going? Well, I mentioned how we initially started as something that replaces SQL in Salesforce, but that was, I would say, our initial point solution. Meanwhile, we've developed into a multi capability platform that does multiple things. Also, our stack, while we're a Salesforce first company, actually our own tech stack is fully independent from that. It runs on Google Cloud. It's working fully via API, so we can be technology agnostic tomorrow if we should choose. Having said that, I love sales for the build, my career, my company. It's a huge market, so we're still happy being a Salesforce first company for probably many years.

Speaker 2:

That's on the product side, on the GDM side, very high level sales marketing, partnerships and PLG. So sales it's outbound, cold calling sequences, prospecting, target account lists, all that stuff. Marketing it's mainly events. There's many awesome events you can do in the Salesforce ecosystem, such as dreamforce it's the most well known one, but there's also connections and many, many others. Natural search, social media, marketing. There's a bunch of stuff we can delve into if you want to. Partnerships where Salesforce partner. So obviously that is really important to us. But we also enable consulting partners, agencies. We call them SI system integrators, people who work with marketing cloud and who are looking for better solutions to add on to it and just do right by their customers and advise them. So we enable those.

Speaker 2:

And then, lastly, plg has product led growth. Most well known examples are companies like Atlassian Gira products that you start using by yourself, you like, get a subscription. Then you tell your buddies now your team's using it and suddenly the whole enterprise is using it. Well, suddenly might take a few years, but in any case that's the idea behind it. Now PLG is notoriously hard to actually get right, but we believe it helps all of promise for our business, seeing how we typically in firstly cater to the more technical marketer and then they enable their team. So it seems we're having, we're serving, the right persona. We have a product that lent itself to it and we have a free version of our product now and we've seen some installations by major major insurance companies and sports teams. So I think it's very promising.

Speaker 1:

Awesome, awesome. Thanks for that. And you've been around for what it's about five years now, since 2019, right, that's right. How have you adapted to changes in the global space, like the main one being the pandemic that was probably the first one we hit and then the second one being AI coming into the mainstream and being available to everyone? So how did you adjust to? Let's start with the pandemic? How did you and your business adjust to the pandemic?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, great question. So the pandemic? That's a funny one because I canceled my final consulting contract, which was for a global automotive company. It was a really interesting job, well paid. I quit it. A week later COVID hit and I went fuck.

Speaker 2:

But, it worked out very well. I think in a sense COVID actually benefited us and the big bummer was building office culture was harder and I think it's really critical to have some office culture and see people face to face for a tech startup, because there's just so much you have to figure out both product and GTM-wise. At least that's how I see it. I hear a little similar thinking and accelerators these days. But aside from that, covid worked out for us because in enterprise SaaS so we're SaaS business models software as a service In enterprise SaaS, customer contact is normally very important, but that's very expensive. Jumping on planes is very expensive, especially for a bootstrap company if you have zero money. So we didn't have to do that because people had to do calls and I think that might have actually helped us. At the same time, during COVID, marketing spend was pretty high Marketing technology spent, and we're in that category. So that kind of worked in our favor. So that was the first one, the second one, I would say.

Speaker 2:

There's actually one other trend I should highlight. That is that SaaS itself has gone through a very turbulent period. In 21,. Fundraising was easy. People would buy software easier. There was this notion of growth at all costs. Didn't matter how many euros you were throwing Eurus, dollars, australian dollar, whatever, how much currency you were throwing at a marketing, qualified lead and opportunity, it just didn't matter. You could do whatever you want.

Speaker 2:

Almost that has completely shifted Money markets, so to do fundraising have become much harder, almost impossible for certain companies. Many SaaS startups have gone bankrupt. Meanwhile there's been massive layoffs in the industry and we might have hit the stabilization point. Some people in the know they think it's going to go up again. We don't know. I don't have a crystal ball. What that has meant for us is just like for the companies who have endured well, it means shifting from growth at all costs to sustainable growth Like an actual business works right, not like a crazy Silicon Valley tech startup works. Suddenly there's no guarantee you can fundraise. So you shift your business from growth at all costs to cash flow positivity as soon as possible. So we've done that shift, I would say pretty well. Sometimes that took making hard decisions. That's not always fun, but it wasn't necessary. I feel we've been very decisive in those things. We've learned very fast, especially being a very young company, and we've come true. I mean, compared to my peers, I know we're in a very comfortable cash position. We have a line of sight and cash flow positivity we don't have to raise unless we want to, those kind of things. So those are big, big shifts in how we think about our business strategically and in a day-to-day operations way.

Speaker 2:

And then, lastly, I'll get to AI. So AI, yeah, I follow this stuff closely myself. I love using chat GPT, for instance, to think about strategy. It's a really interesting tool to think about your strategy or to think about organizational design, roles and responsibilities, sort of some of my personal use cases. But we start to integrate the product very early on into our segmentation solution to offer a feature we call DD AI DD being the name of our penguin mascot, by the way. So DD, ai, that's our AI capability. So now you can shout at your laptop to get a segment, at least as the idea. However, there's some learnings and I can talk more about that if we have the time. But that's one way we start integrating it In other parts of our product. We also have machine learning. Whether you consider that AI or not, you know that's your choice, but we have machine learning built in to do things like frequency optimization. That's part of our engaged product, which is another module on our platform.

Speaker 1:

Okay, awesome, awesome. And are there any specific tools or tactics that your business makes use of that have been particularly effective in helping you grow to where you are?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean there's a million. I could name my number one because I know this is a very founder heavy audience here Talk with customers, keep talking with customers. Even if you, you know, make 100 million a year, you should be talking to your customers on a daily basis if you can. So just recently, just to, kind of because there's so much going on the market AI there's a lot of stuff happening in the Salesforce ecosystem, specifically Mark tech is remains a very dynamic field. So me and my co-founder actually just wrapped up doing 57 interviews with marketing leaders and experts in companies from mid market to Fortune 100 companies, literally and and and doing those interviews just to get a feel of what is everyone thinking, what are the main challenges, what can we do. There's all of good content out there from somebody by a combinator, on how to talk with customers, and so now we have this whole big piece of meat we can feed into our product management thinking we can use for content. So talk with customers. Number one. Number two what's really worked for us is get your insights into your industry, product use cases, things you're solving into something like an ebook, but make it really educational and then recycle the heck out of that piece of content. So I'm recycling. What I mean with that is you post it on social media and say, hey, if you comment, I'll send you the ebook. Now, ever in post on the post, the post explodes. You capture leads, but at the same time you also post the ebook fully exposed as a landing page, because that creates natural search and then people who are scrolling they'll see a pop up. They can leave their email address. What it was going to do for you is going to be less leads and if you would gate it but the leads you get a more qualified. And it's exactly what you want less leads, but more qualified. And then you turn it into a webinar and then you cut up the webinar and then you make sure it's an, etc. Etc. So recycle, recycle, recycle, recycle Super duper important. I think those are two things I've really worked.

Speaker 2:

And in terms of tools, one tool I'm a fan of is gong gong. For those who don't know it's, it's meant to be sales coaching and what it does is record your calls and then your sales manager can coach people. But we use the crowd organization, we use it for CS, we use it for marketing, we use it for product management. So how? So say, for instance, I want to know what people are thinking about.

Speaker 2:

Let's say AI, right, I actually have a tracker. It's funny. I actually have a tracker set up in gong to listen to what people are saying about AI, whether it's our product or generally. I don't have AI in general, and at the end of the week, gong sends me a nice report with everything anyone has said about AI and I can just click to the exact second when people are saying that this is a great way for me to not just coach people but to also hear from customers directly what are they saying and not have it rephrased by someone else reporting to me. It's really important to stay very close to the exact terminology people are using to you, that you're marketing, you're thinking, etc. So these are just three, but I you know I could geek out for another day probably 100%.

Speaker 1:

Now I could also chat about it for days. And what has been the biggest challenges for you, let's say, firstly in launching the business? So what were the startup challenges that you faced? And then what have been ongoing challenges in scaling the businesses and how have you overcome those challenges?

Speaker 2:

Oh yeah, absolutely great question. So many. This might surprise you. It's not easy starting a business, right, I mean I you know. But maybe when starting look, it's just hard you have to work hard. I saw startups in the accelerators that we were part of. We were in an accelerator in Belgium called Start at KBC. They helped us a ton initially, but there were many startups there that honestly didn't crush it as hard as they probably could have For the first months of really like from the moment we decided, okay, this thing is going to be a thing because we got customer interest, there was a period I worked seven days out of seven four months straight.

Speaker 2:

This was a combination of a few consulting things I was still doing to pay mortgage and food, but then I was also just working the remaining whatever hours of the day every day. Sunday days, I would work public holidays, I worked on Christmas, I worked on New Year's Day, that kind of stuff, and I still work often six days a week, and I think that's is that a challenge. I think that's just something you have to stomach and train yourself into. Do another, much more specific one when scaling the business is once you, especially in a tech company, at some point you need to hire for great leadership and the one single most important role, arguably or one of the most important ones at least is your VP sales. Now, vp sales are good VP sales super hard to find. It's a hard skill set. It's a grind of a job. Also, if you get the wrong person, it sets you back six months at least, because finding a new one will take about that long and they can really make or break your company. Like a great VP sales, they find talent, the business grows faster, everything becomes easier. Bad VP sales will build bad process, bad culture, etc.

Speaker 2:

So there's this saying in SAS and I kind of hate it and it's something like as a new CEO, founder, you need to get past the corpse of your first VP sales, meaning the first one never works out. So I had to go past two corpses. I unfortunately had two mis-hires and from the moment we raised venture capital, it actually took us more than 80 months to finally have a great VP sales. And now we do have a great VP sales. Jason, if you're listening, thank you for everything you're doing for us and it's making a difference. And, you know, maybe it had to take 18 months for us and I could have maybe compromised for someone who was adequate. But I think it's really important to find people who are great, especially for leadership role, but, frankly, for any role. So that was definitely a challenge because in that period I had to juggle many heads. I moved to the US, I had to still coach salespeople are still in many deals, I was still being a CEO, still talking to the board and investors, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 1:

But, yeah, just have Amazing yeah, that's a common discussion I'm having on these shows is that it takes a lot for CEO to like finally hand over the reins of a specific department Because, like it's, obviously it's your baby, you know. But you've got to come to that point where you realize you don't have time to do all of these things, so you actually do need to hand it over for the business to continue growing.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and then it's super important point.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and you know it's interesting. I've always I've never liked the phrase it's your baby somehow doesn't resonate. I like to think of it as like it's our project. We're doing this together and I try not to be too identified with it. But I think the right way to think about hiring talent, especially if for your leadership team as the CEO, is find people who are better at the thing that you are. Like as a CEO, as a founder CEO, you're going to have to learn everything, everything, if only just to hire the right person. Like if you're hiring tomorrow for a head of CS, you're going to have to learn what CS is about, right, and you better study fast. But the person you do hire has to bear it as you are. Otherwise you're going to always want to micromanage a person and step in, and you can do that. You have to make sure those people alleviate you so you can focus on other stuff.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, 100%, 100%. And can you speak to any metrics or KPIs that you use to measure the success of your business?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, so there's, there's dozens, literally dozens of KPIs we have. I mean, actually it's funny, even in our marketing department. So they have a list of KPIs. It's literally 150 KPIs. But but I mean, those are maybe metrics, maybe they're not KPIs.

Speaker 2:

The KPIs that I look at as CEO founder obviously ARR, so annual recurring revenue. Then there's the growth rate linked to that. There is NRR, which is revenue retention, and revenue retention itself. I can I can speak to those in a second CAC payback, burn, cash runway, and, and the thing is well, if there's one metric as the most important of all, it's probably ARR. But these metrics do have to play together. So it's not that there's one or two metrics I'm only focused on. It is a more of a holistic view. What does the whole dashboard look like? So, but ARR is the most important one, just because, as a SaaS company, your valuation is dependent mainly on ARR and the growth rate linked to it.

Speaker 2:

So for us, keeping a steady, I mean keeping the same growth rate year over year, which means every year we have to grow faster and faster, and the current market that means faster and faster with less means. That's important. So that's, that's part of the grind. Another thing is revenue retention, so avoiding churn, making sure you keep your customers happy and they expand rather than leave, is really important. We have very healthy metrics there.

Speaker 2:

I want to get them a little bit better. And in terms of expansion, which will trickle into NRR, these days, for great, a great metric would be 130%, but other world-class companies today, today's market, at our stage, above 100%, is often considered good. We're comfortably above that, but we can probably go much higher because of the new product, engage, which we've launched last year, which is getting a lot of traction. So I think that metric is going to get better. Cag payback, that's customer acquisition costs. That's the reflection of how long it takes to earn back the money you've spent on sales and marketing, essentially, so that gives you an idea of how efficient is your growth machine, so that one is one of them looking at very often. And then, of course, cash in a runway. Keep your burn low, especially today where fundraising is not a given or not easy, and get to cash flow positivity in the current market is something that most companies are doing, most SaaS companies at least.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, 100%, and that's the main point of our podcast is growing lean. So growing while staying as lean as possible. I think it's super important these days, especially in this economy. Totally, and where do you see your industry heading, let's say, in the next year and in the next five years?

Speaker 2:

Yeah. So one trend that I've definitely seen and I've mentioned our interviews and if people are curious about learning about these lessons, you can follow me on LinkedIn. We'll be posting about that shortly but Marketing leaders, even at enterprise companies, they don't want to do long digital transformation projects and more Like digital transformation still sounds kind of sexy, but what it means is you're going to spend a consulting firm a million to do a 12-month project to hopefully get this new integration with your data warehouse or whatever running and there's just not a lot of appetite there, because in today's market, to be competitive, you need a really fast time to market right. The speed you go to market is really important and if you're waiting for 12 months for a tool to be implemented without even knowing it's really going to pay off, that's a hard sell. So that's why our turnkey approach, I think, is really very valuable.

Speaker 2:

Another thing that I see in the MarTech space is so sometimes people say, oh, maybe the market is saturated with MarTech. I don't believe it. There is this very famous chart by Scott Brinker where he edges out the MarTech landscape. A year ago this was a single slide with a few dozen companies. Meanwhile, it's amazing it's 10,000 logos of MarTech solutions. And now some people say, oh, there's going to be acquisitions and mergers. But I believe, given capitalism and what it is, and given a still growing world population, there's just going to be more sophistication. Right, we're just going to get more and more refined in our marketing and technology. There's going to be more players, even though there's going to be mergers and acquisitions. So I think that's a trend that will continue.

Speaker 2:

There's one thing that large companies and mid-market companies and even small companies struggle with is because there's not so much sophistication in your tooling. There's all these automations, automated nurturing journey, et cetera. People have lost the overview of what's really going on. One customer told me a couple of weeks ago we don't even know what we're sending out anymore, right? So there's this risk that maybe if you're a marketer, you're bombarding your subscribers and they're going to unsubscribe, they're going to leave. It's very hard to get subscribers these days. So that's where we're also coming into play with Engage. We've made sure it's cross-channel and it can already integrate all Salesforce marketing cloud channels. That's email, text, mobile push, that's in Salesforce marketing cloud. But we also allow custom channels, meaning maybe you want to integrate your CRM, Maybe you have another ESP, et cetera. Now you can integrate it into Engage so you can work cross-channel, so you can deal with those 10,000 marketing solutions out there as a marketer.

Speaker 1:

Wonderful St Amazing. Thanks for that, and could you discuss any partnerships or collaborations that have helped you form the business and grow the business?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, definitely. So I think again, I've already given a little shout out, but one thing that really helped us at the start was started at KBC. They're an accelerator based in Belgium, so I guess my message here would be for especially aspiring founders if you have a local accelerator these guys they gave us free office space and a bunch of coaching and that just made a huge difference. There's this romantic image of working from your garage, but if you actually have an office where you can go to, it's easier to hire and it's also it's good for your own psychology, for your own mentality about it, right?

Speaker 2:

Like okay, I'm actually going to work, I'm going to build something. I'm not going to chill at home and maybe have this little side project which is the risk of the garage approach. So that definitely helped. And then, no, we're an official Salesforce partner, so that's by far the most important one. It goes as far as revenue sharing. I fly out like. A couple of weeks ago I was in Chicago giving a training to pre-sales support from sales for the ComSolution engineers. For those who are familiar, so that goes very far and that has led to them helping us on deals. It has. We're listed on their Salesforce app exchange. For those who don't know, that's the largest B2B app store. Essentially you can find and you know it's brought us leads as well.

Speaker 2:

And then, finally, these are sometimes formal, sometimes less formal partnerships, but, as I've alluded to before, consulting firms, agencies, marketing agencies, can be a very pivotal role for us because they're often in a great position to recommend good solutions to their customers.

Speaker 2:

And so those consulting firms, agencies who really want to just advise good solutions, they will often reach out to us and bring us to customers. And so, for instance, we've had really good success with some of the big ones Capgeminite, deloitte, accenture. These are some of the consulting firms that have all referred us to really great customers, so we're very grateful for those things especially. It's also funny about me and my co-founder we come originally from Deloitte, so it's nice to still have those contacts. But then we've also worked with, I would say, more boutique-sized marketing agencies who have done similar things for us and us enabling them being a good partner, giving them credibility, invisibility and transparency. Yeah, that works, but it's a very long, long-term play. If you're investing in partner management today, your real return will come 18 months from now, and so you have to be willing to do that and able to do that.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, 100%. Couldn't agree more on that. And, anthony, we are coming to the end of the show, but before we go, what advice would you like to give to other tech founders looking to succeed in today's world?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I love that question. Look, there's three, three main things. I would say that I've learned in the past few years and it's been quite a ride, but the first one would be so. So if you're an aspiring founder, solve for problems. Don't look for a great idea. I did three startup ideas before. The one single difference between this one and the previous three ones I failed was with this one I actually saw a problem that went out to solve. You're super smart, you have tons of ideas, nobody cares. Look for a problem to actually solve and then work on that.

Speaker 2:

Secondly, sell before you build. So initially, once we had, once we saw the problem, it thought, oh, maybe we can solve it. Then we started to sell it before we actually coded. So we got a request for a quote from an insurance company before we wrote a single line of code and to some extent to some extent we still do that we never make any guarantee that we can make. True, we've never failed to deliver on promises that we made during sales engagements and so on. But even today, there may be requests from customers and if we haven't built them yet, we will only built them if you know there's will probably be an extra upsell on that. So sell before you build.

Speaker 2:

And then lastly really it's going to sound almost silly or self-evident, but it's just worth repeating hire great people and for newer founders or for people who never hire, your standards will go up throughout the process. You have to figure out what it was great look like and, as one of my investors and mentors has taught me, or you know, as he explained it in the end your company is nothing but the people in it. So choose wisely. Hire slow fire. Fast sounds rough, but you have to do it for the rest of the organization, to make sure you can keep the ship floating. And look for great talent and once you have them, it's awesome Like look for people you love working with smart people that push you yourself as well.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, 100%. I love that last one and thanks. Thank you for that and thanks for your time today, anthony. I've really enjoyed learning more about you and your business. What's the best way for our listeners to get in touch with you if you're open to that, or if they're looking to get involved with your software or just following your journey?

Speaker 2:

Yeah, first off, thank you so much again, dij, for being on the show. I love the questions, love chatting with you and thanks for asking so people who want to follow me personally. They can find me on LinkedIn. Just if you look for Anthony Lamott, I think I'm still the only one on LinkedIn out there. And then if you want to learn more about Deselect, simply go to Deselectcom, subscribe to our newsletter, check out our website, learn a bit more about what we do. And, yeah, people can always reach out to me on LinkedIn too if they have any questions.

Speaker 1:

Awesome, awesome, thanks so much, anthony. Thank you, it's been a pleasure have a great day.

Business Growth and Adaptation Strategies
AI Integration in Business Strategy
Startup and Scaling Business Challenges
Startup Success Strategies