00:01.70 Robert Karel Hosting events or sponsoring third-party conferences remains one of the most tried-and-true plays in the B2B marketing playbook, and when targeted and executed effectively, can be extremely valuable. You're engaging with your customers and prospects in person. What can go wrong? 00:15.48 Robert Karel But for early-stage startups, the stakes and risks are very high. Every dollar spent on a conference sponsorship or hosted dinner is a dollar not spent on hiring, product, or pipeline. 00:26.17 Robert Karel My guest today is Philippe Boutros, co-founder of GetWhys. and We're going to unpack what's worked when they've been on events as a growth channel, what hasn't, and what lessons he's learned the hard way so you don't have to. 00:37.05 Robert Karel Philippe, welcome. 00:38.52 Philippe Boutros Rob, thanks for having us. 00:40.66 Robert Karel Well, um let's get started. 00:41.21 Philippe Boutros every me 00:42.50 Robert Karel ah one to Give us a little bit of your background and you know what led you to found GetWhys. 00:50.17 Philippe Boutros Yeah, I am. I'm a longtime B2B tech market researcher. so It's been more than a decade now that this has been the only thing I've been doing. um And I actually started this because I was laid off as the solo marketer at a Series a um I was looking around for what to do next. it's not the most like in It's not the most inspiring founding story, but I'm looking around for what to do next. And I saw everybody out there creating some version of a... 01:20.82 Philippe Boutros an AI startup, some sort of large language model driven startup. And I looked at what they were doing and thought, man, everyone is going to either be using the data set that's on the Internet or the data set that's inside of a company's walls. 01:34.17 Philippe Boutros I know how to collect really meaningful data to companies and why maybe this whole AI thing lets us unlock a new business model. so that's what we've been doing for three years now. And events have been a big part of what's helped us grow. 01:48.93 Philippe Boutros can actually access large enterprise customers. And we've learned a lot along the way, so I'm excited to talk about it. 01:55.51 Robert Karel Yeah, I'm really looking forward to it And I think your founding story is probably pretty common. And, you know, over time you can make up different parts of it, you know, to let the legend grow. 02:06.42 Philippe Boutros Yeah. 02:07.58 Robert Karel So 02:07.67 Philippe Boutros Yeah, I think I, yeah, this is, we we won't don't have to go into this necessarily, but like the whole like founder mystique is so gross to me. Like, no, it's, we just started, like it made it made sense to do at the time. Yeah. 02:17.97 Robert Karel your role as a founder means you are by definition the lead marketer as well. 02:18.07 Philippe Boutros um 02:25.33 Philippe Boutros Mm-hmm. 02:25.34 Robert Karel because you need to figure out what is your story. 02:25.77 Philippe Boutros Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 02:28.51 Robert Karel Product market fit is just that. What's the product and who am I going to sell it to, to make this well business? So where are you in your go to market journey after these years? 02:41.05 Philippe Boutros Yeah, i am one of the things that, um one of the major inflection points for us as a company was having the ability to actually bring on go-to-market professionals. so um And if you look at our history with events in particular, there's the events we went to in 2023 where I was the only marketer and seller. 03:01.40 Philippe Boutros those were not successful and then 2024 onwards when we brought on um uh lottie brinks to run marketing brandon riggs to be our head product marketer uh derek to run sales um we've seen just much more success from actually having people in the seat who know what they're doing um and i'll go in particular into like how the different backgrounds of people have lended themselves towards having better ah better presence and outcome from events but um yeah right person right seat yeah 03:27.70 Robert Karel Yeah, that'll be definitely a believe that'll be a valuable part of the conversation. But you know just from the beginning, you know at the at the high level, aspirational level, as a co-founder doing your own marketing before you brought in some of these expert resources, what were you hoping events would do for GetWhys early on? What was the actual metric of success that you were targeting? 03:53.34 Philippe Boutros Yeah, great question. The single metric would be leads, right? people People raising their hand and saying, I like what you're selling. Let's talk more and like actually try this thing out or buy it. 04:05.98 Philippe Boutros And I think every founder particular, like you you know you know what you're building towards and that you might not be all the way there yet, but even you know that what you have now is pretty great. So you sort of assume if you're just in the right room with the right people, that's going to resonate with them and they're going to want to talk come talk to you and come sort of see what you've been building. That could not be further from reality. 04:28.06 Philippe Boutros i I was, uh, because I was a consultant and I worked for so many wonderful customers at really well-known like B2B technology companies. Um, I had a good personal network at the beginning when starting this, I knew how to, i had friends and former customers who wanted to try what we were doing just because they'd previously worked with my co-founder and I, um, that, uh, that did not carry over to just look at these, look at these two or three guys at this event. 04:54.62 Philippe Boutros Um, so we had to, we had to take a different approach. 04:58.52 Robert Karel So how often do you think you know your peer of founders at early stage companies look at events as maybe a silver bullet or leap of faith where they're just, you know if we hosted, they will come? and you know Because it's inexpensive. Talk about you know acquisition costs. 05:17.08 Robert Karel you know, a digital lead is a lot cheaper than buying someone a steak or having to pay for a booth at someone's conference. 05:17.15 Philippe Boutros Yeah. 05:26.55 Robert Karel So what do you feel is the, like, how many early stage founders are just assuming this is a silver bullet to quality leads versus them actually having a plan or a strategy? 05:38.91 Philippe Boutros I would assume it is, particularly like in B2B, I would assume it is the expectation. i think people um I've met a lot of founders, particularly with technical backgrounds, who sort of assume sales is wining and dining people. 05:49.29 Robert Karel Mm-hmm. 05:53.21 Philippe Boutros Marketing is if you put if you have the right brand colors and the right taglines, people will just show up and want to buy your thing. And that would be really great if that's how it worked. and Unfortunately, it's not. 06:05.37 Robert Karel So what is the right at the earliest stages when maybe you're you've got some seed funding or maybe you've got a first stage, let's assume you haven't secured up that hundred million series a year You're actually dealing with kind of shoestring funding, if anything. 06:24.40 Robert Karel What's the right role for events? Because these are not the least expensive ways to go to market when you're really strapped for cash. 06:32.63 Philippe Boutros Yeah. ah I think that you need to look at events with very different goals. like Not every event has same goal. um And if we're going to like be pretty simplistic, we could maybe divide them into two categories. 06:47.02 Philippe Boutros There's events that you're paying for where you, your main goal might be just put my brand in front of this audience and start to build up word of mouth. Um, I would think of like any, any like in-person thing where your audience is going to be there regardless as an example of that. 07:02.92 Philippe Boutros Um, there's a guerilla marketing story that doesn't apply to ours where, um, there was a cybersecurity vendor that couldn't afford to get a booth at RSA. And ah instead they just set up like a coffee cart out front since they knew all the audience would be walking through. 07:16.04 Robert Karel Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 07:16.47 Philippe Boutros I love stories like that. I have had an old boss used to describe that as asymmetric warfare in marketing, right? 07:22.63 Robert Karel Mm-hmm. 07:23.26 Philippe Boutros How does your $1 go further than their 40? um So that's one category of events, like just showing up where your audience is going to be. And if you don't have a tantalizing message, if you don't have an offer that's going to draw them, at the very least, they're going to see your name, start remembering it, and that might be helpful for the next time. It is difficult to look at that as a metric of success, though, particularly when you're early stage startup and every single month you need to tell your board how many leads you've got, how demos are going, stuff like that. 07:51.29 Philippe Boutros um The other category... ah Basically enticing people to spend time with you through potentially like wining and dining, just having a nice meal and getting to know people interpersonally and maybe a group context, you have your customers invite their friends. 08:07.86 Philippe Boutros um Or you can do, you can attempt to do silly things like we've attempted to do like group runs, right? Or other types of things, because ultimately um you are selling to human beings and human beings have human interests and you can meet them in some ways. 08:25.43 Robert Karel Yeah, which is which is great. And I'm a big fan of the guerilla thing. I'd say I was on the receiving end back when I was at Informatica and we had our Informatica World Conference. 08:32.44 Philippe Boutros Oh, no. 08:36.02 Robert Karel We had one of our competitors was at the exits of the Moscone Center handing out cookies. 08:42.40 Philippe Boutros Love it. 08:42.71 Robert Karel um Right. And was like, brilliant. And we we couldn't be angry. We were like, man, that was that's an awesome idea. We love that. You know, so I'm a big fan of when you when you don't have the budget or you don't have the invitation to come in. 08:48.84 Philippe Boutros Yeah. 08:55.67 Robert Karel You know, it's a cheap. 08:55.79 Philippe Boutros Yeah. 08:57.19 Robert Karel It just requires creativity and a little bit of manpower. 09:00.86 Philippe Boutros Yeah, I love, I think, I don't think, this isn't quite events, but like I love the idea of buying, and we haven't done this, but I love the idea of buying billboards at like the exact right location. 09:09.83 Robert Karel Mm hmm. 09:10.20 Philippe Boutros Sounds so fun. But yeah, projects for another time. 09:14.49 Robert Karel Yeah, exactly. but So let's talk about there's so this two types of in-person engagements. There's conferences that someone else is throwing that you sponsor and participate in, or there's the in-person events or virtual events, whatever that you host. So let's start with conference sponsorship. 09:32.38 Robert Karel because that can get pretty pricey pretty quick. And you know it's like, it's not just the cost of the booth, it's the cost of everything that goes into the booth and the travel and all the other logistics. So take the booth cost and multiply it by two and you know that might be your fully loaded cost of a sponsorship. 09:43.35 Philippe Boutros And time. Yeah. 09:49.75 Robert Karel So um have you guys ah done that type of sponsorship yet? 09:49.78 Philippe Boutros Yeah. 09:55.36 Robert Karel And what have been some of your decision points when you've asked the question of should you? 09:55.46 Philippe Boutros Quite a few. 10:01.11 Philippe Boutros Yeah, um luckily at the earliest days when it was like, should we try, we had the ability to just say, we need to experiment with everything. And then if something feels like it's staking, we can double down on it. 10:13.72 Philippe Boutros So ah like ah because we sell a fairly high ACV product, we theoretically just thought, if we can get one customer out of this, this is worth it, right? 10:24.99 Robert Karel Right. 10:25.17 Philippe Boutros And we did from our very first one. um so it was it did end up being worth it um the lessons learned along the way though were hard fought um particularly with conferences you can reuse um all of the things you buy right all the things you make you could reuse the uh you when you buy a ton of swag you're not going to go through it the first time which is great so you can reuse that whatever the panel or wall is behind you um the the the the tablecloth cover um we're currently shipping a bunch of monitors to our next conference which is actually tomorrow um because we bought them once instead of renting them never rent never rent the equipment that these places so it's that's you it's you serious it's terrible um but uh 10:59.27 Robert Karel Right. 11:03.29 Robert Karel Yes. 11:07.58 Robert Karel I'm not going to like listen to what the unions might have to say about that. But 11:11.06 Philippe Boutros Oh, I, to be, GetWhys is firmly supportive of every union activity. 11:15.00 Robert Karel ah 11:16.50 Philippe Boutros We're the first, we're the first Marxist startup is what I like to tell people. But, um ah and I know, i know we could cut that, but maybe people will find it fun if we don't. So I'll leave that as a different call up to you. 11:25.94 Robert Karel Exactly. look OK, we'll see. 11:27.93 Philippe Boutros Yeah, but um ah there's a lot of ways to spend a ton of money. Things that we've chosen not to do and we felt pretty good about it, for example, are the, you can rent these things, these like little gizmos that scan someone's name badge and log them into your CRM. 11:41.71 Robert Karel Yeah. 11:44.28 Philippe Boutros We have never done that because it's probably the most awkward thing in the world to go just point a device at somebody instead of trying to shake their hand. 11:44.39 Robert Karel Mm-hmm. 11:51.19 Robert Karel Mm-hmm. 11:51.35 Philippe Boutros And ultimately it is about human to human connection. and We just want to be there to be humans. Yeah. 12:01.50 Robert Karel Yeah, so we're kind of saying what makes conference sponsorship worthwhile? 12:09.33 Philippe Boutros Yeah. Ultimately, we're just trying to get a certain number of people who want to come and spend more time with us post-conference. um We have found... um Can I just launch it into a few things at events that like have been helpful for us at conferences? 12:20.85 Robert Karel Yeah, please. 12:22.65 Philippe Boutros Yeah. um we So here's a mistake we made early on. We sent four of us to our first conference in person that we were sponsoring instead of just attending. If you're not sponsoring a conference, it's really hard to meet people in some way, unless you're doing these guerrilla marketing tactics. 12:39.38 Philippe Boutros We sent four people to the our first sponsored one, um not naming names, two are more extroverted than the other two. And the presence that you have at the booth, people need to, like, it is a bit weird to walk up to a booth and start talking to a stranger anyway. You need to want that to happen. You need to seem like a spot that is fun and not going to be too heavy-handed, just have the right energy and offer something interesting. 13:06.65 Philippe Boutros um So ah if you're if the the team members you're thinking of sending a little more introverted, maybe send the ones that are a little more extroverted. The people that look genuinely happy to be talking to strangers. 13:17.94 Philippe Boutros um Yeah, that was ah that was like an an easy lesson learned for us. 13:21.94 Robert Karel Yeah, and I can't tell you how often you know I'll be walking around an event floor and people behind the booth are like on their phones or their backs turned or they're avoiding eye contact. 13:30.99 Philippe Boutros Yeah. 13:33.52 Robert Karel And you're like, I don't want to go say hi because it doesn't seem like they want me to bother them, which is not maybe the presence you want on a conference sponsorship. 13:39.29 Philippe Boutros Yeah. 13:43.13 Philippe Boutros Yeah. And I'm, I'm guilty of that too. I, um, I'm pretty extroverted, but I'm easily distracted and there's other things that like might get my attention. And I think I've had to do is if I know that I'm thinking about something else or need to go like do some work, remove yourself from the booth, right? 13:59.45 Philippe Boutros If anything, go sit at a competitor's booth, go park that bad attitude somewhere else. 14:03.54 Robert Karel That's 14:05.81 Philippe Boutros Um, and then it'll be a little better. 14:07.83 Robert Karel a great point. And so, and I like the beyond the booth way of thinking. So one, you got kind of the kind of the character profile of the staff that you want in the booth. 14:18.90 Robert Karel What about the skills of the people that you want in the booth? 14:19.12 Philippe Boutros Yeah. 14:23.02 Robert Karel And what other preparation other than the color and the tagline um should be made to get the most out of that type of investment? 14:32.86 Philippe Boutros Yeah, I think here's another thing we haven't done a good job with historically. So we've previously had members of the team who were a newer go to conferences because we thought um they're new to the product and this would be a great way for them to learn like the audience we're selling to, which is the right attitude. 14:48.22 Philippe Boutros Do not make those people responsible for selling your products and your vision, right? 14:50.57 Robert Karel Mm-hmm. 14:52.42 Philippe Boutros Their job is there to learn. They're there on a learning mandate. They should be listening to all the talks and doing that. They should not be getting questions from people where the answer from, we literally got an answer from a prospective customer, quite literally told one of our people, you should know the answers to this, your product marketer should have given them to you. Which is something like maybe this was this person's second week and we shouldn't be throwing them like right off the, into the deep end. um 15:19.81 Robert Karel It doesn't help that you're selling to product marketers who know how to get this done. 15:23.33 Philippe Boutros Who are exactly who are, um, yeah, extremely thoughtful with it. Um, in terms of the skill sets of people there, um, I think, uh, knowing the product is one thing, knowing the audience you're selling to is another. 15:35.99 Philippe Boutros Um, like tomorrow we're having, um, people who are experts in the product go so that they can be there to answer questions and our product marketer, right. Partially. So you can just relate to everybody there. 15:46.83 Philippe Boutros Um, cause it's gonna be like recognizes like, um, yeah. 15:52.98 Robert Karel So what about kind of the product preparation, like the demo experience or the hands-on or what's on the monitor? 15:53.07 Philippe Boutros Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 16:01.46 Robert Karel It's like how much, because every conference theoretically may have a slightly different audience. One might have practitioners, another might have maybe more budget holders or decision makers. 16:13.15 Robert Karel So how do you adapt the product experience for those? 16:16.66 Philippe Boutros yeah 16:19.77 Philippe Boutros And it's especially challenging when you have a or horizon horizontal product, something that can do a lot of things, a Swiss Army knife can do a lot of things a lot of different people. We had, ah was it you who once told me no one's in the market for Swiss Army knife? 16:33.69 Philippe Boutros um I think that's something you would say. 16:35.03 Robert Karel um it it It very well could have been because I certainly am the guy that constantly is telling people you need to focus and prioritize. 16:37.85 Philippe Boutros Yeah. 16:41.34 Philippe Boutros Yeah. 16:42.81 Robert Karel Everything's not created equal. But um let's just say whoever said it, I couldn't agree more. 16:44.58 Philippe Boutros Yeah. 16:47.99 Philippe Boutros Yeah, it's, it sounds like a, like a Karel-ism, but, um, uh, yeah, the product experience is interesting. So we've migrated from, um, having this like open-ended, like just show up here and start typing and whatever to actually just showing the marketing site and making people come talk to us about what they're doing. 17:06.26 Philippe Boutros That way, when the, when, once we've learned what they're doing, we can man, we can tailor the experience they're going to have on the product to them, like, as they're doing it. 17:06.27 Robert Karel So, 17:14.61 Philippe Boutros um We're actually doing something non-digital this time that is product related. So we have um conferences will give you like full list of attending companies, right? um Because they want you as the sponsor. If you like, it's going worth your time. 17:28.60 Philippe Boutros um We have a list of our high value targets. We've prepared using our own product folders for them, where if someone says, hello, I'm from Acme Corp. 17:38.16 Robert Karel Mm-hmm. 17:38.39 Philippe Boutros We can say, hey, Acme Corp, here's a takeaway thing for you to read later. It's based on, you know, 25 in-depth interviews that we've done with your customers and your competition and blah, blah, blah. um I think when everybody's out there, like, trying to figure out what the next version of a hat or socks or a keychain is, and we're saying, here's something you can use at your job. 17:59.03 Philippe Boutros um Yeah, it's it's it's very fun to do that sort of thing. That's a little different. um Another piece about the product experience, we always go to conferences with a title customer. 18:10.81 Philippe Boutros So we want we want to have the the only thing, or there are many things better than like having a company tell you how good their own product is. One of those many things is having their own customer tell you, I couldn't live without this. 18:24.31 Philippe Boutros So we typically put on some sort of a workshop where we're putting people in a real life scenario related to their job. Our product is ancillary to that solution. It's not the core part of it only. They're there to be humans, meet other people, and learn skills for their own job. 18:39.26 Philippe Boutros But it really helps have a customer there sort of running the workshop and showing that off. 18:44.98 Robert Karel I love the prep work, just unique to your product. Not everyone has a product that is relevant to that, and you're not going to have one folder for every potential person that shows up. 18:51.14 Philippe Boutros Yep. Can do Yep. 18:57.68 Robert Karel But if your team at the booth knows which accounts that you actually have done that work for, have a little checklist to check against, that's a pretty powerful impact. 18:57.93 Philippe Boutros Yep. 19:09.85 Robert Karel We've been waiting for you. 19:11.38 Philippe Boutros Yeah, we'll do a we can do a follow-up podcast if you want on how well or not that worked, but we're very excited about it. it mirrors are It's how we do outbound, so it's just the same. 19:16.73 Robert Karel Yeah. and 19:19.37 Robert Karel Right. 19:20.29 Philippe Boutros Yeah. 19:20.57 Robert Karel And I can tell you this, whether it attracted a lead or not, you were memorable. 19:26.88 Philippe Boutros Yeah. 19:27.35 Robert Karel And again, so a big part of these sponsorships is, you know, as you mentioned, i asked what was your initial goal when you first started events or conferences was leads. And that's huge. But as you get to a certain at scale size, you're Very often, it's less about leads and more about market awareness. And we're part of the conversation. And hopefully, it'll drive leads. 19:49.33 Robert Karel But it's important you're there. And that's expensive. 19:53.10 Philippe Boutros Yeah. 19:53.48 Robert Karel Not everyone can afford to just be there just for visibility. 19:57.72 Philippe Boutros Yeah. 19:57.90 Robert Karel But it's part of the metric as you scale up. 19:58.74 Philippe Boutros Yeah. It is, I think it's really hard to, find especially with a product like ours to to to say something that's so resonant that someone will go and say i'm going to authorize a five or six figure purchase off the bat just for this thing i've never heard of i think it's very different if you've been seeing them time and time again and feeling like the accumulated pain of this of the problem over time um yeah and ideally every time you look at that booth it has more logos on the wall i mean that's fine sort of nice 20:30.23 Robert Karel Right. and you know And one of my prior episodes was all about our attribution. And you know when you're talking about an enterprise sale, 20:36.28 Philippe Boutros Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 20:39.25 Robert Karel lots and lots of touch points that lead to an eventual sale. And it's you're very you're not going to have someone signing an s SOW or um a contract at the booth for a five, six-figure deal. but You never know. there's One of the takeaways from attribution was you don't know what engagement is a thing that pushed someone inside their head over the edge to actually go deeper. 21:04.28 Robert Karel But if the accumulation of it, to your point, is the value, but it's an investment. 21:10.33 Philippe Boutros and adds up. Yeah, I think I bet one of the mistakes that other founders make is trying to instrument everything. And there are some things, particularly in this kind of space where you just have to know that like the thing you control is your activity. You can't really measure the impacts all that activity. 21:29.05 Philippe Boutros But if you're just doing the right thing over and over again, it'll work. And yeah. 21:34.20 Robert Karel Yeah. So shifting from conferences to your own hosted events and, you know, whether it's dinners or runs or ah or whatnot, um what, let's let's start with, you know, I don't want to go right to the negative. 21:42.43 Philippe Boutros Yeah. 21:49.95 Robert Karel with What's been working well? What have you felt, okay, let's get right to the wins. 21:56.98 Philippe Boutros Yeah. 21:57.01 Robert Karel We've done this and it was really impactful because it achieved X. 22:04.18 Philippe Boutros Yeah. um Two kinds of things. One, we we have done sort of like intimate like which sounds a little weird in a business context but like smaller dinners between good groups of people where the whole there's no there's no pitch associated with it or anything it's just come bring a friend spend some time you'll have some really good food you'll meet some good people have interesting conversation um that that's worked really well for us as just a way of getting our name out um i would strongly recommend if you are someone who knows good people to just keep introducing them to good people if you can facilitate that over some sort of like we've done meals but um that can be a baseball game that can be 22:45.11 Philippe Boutros any sort of like outdoor thing. But if you if you can if you can pull a small group of people together who haven't known each other and who would enjoy, like sincerely, genuinely enjoy knowing each other, you should always do that. 22:56.86 Philippe Boutros um We looked at the, cause like founder led or, you know, like intimate dinners or whatever, everybody's doing those. there's a There's an abundance of people in restaurants. So like we might as well do that so and tip well. 23:12.86 Philippe Boutros because we are a Marxist startup and we should help the workers. 23:16.28 Robert Karel Mm-hmm. 23:16.50 Philippe Boutros But ah we looked at everybody doing that and thought, this is regionally bound and fundamentally it's working because people are to some degree lonely and craving connection. 23:31.83 Philippe Boutros And there's no reason to limit that to expensive meals that are in-person in person in the city. um So we started putting on these virtual events where there was no agenda beyond sort of an open pseudo office hours thing um where you you pick, i like what we do is we have a few other like well-known names in the space who just say, 23:45.80 Robert Karel Thank you. 23:53.66 Philippe Boutros person A, B, C are going to be on a call. No pitches, no call recorders allowed. Come hop on in and just meet some good people. We've done those almost monthly. There's literally nothing associated with it. We don't send out any swag. 24:07.45 Philippe Boutros we don't like There's no follow on marketing. There's nothing else. um I think that has probably been the single like most successful thing we've done from marketing perspective in terms of like just building an accruing audience. 24:18.02 Robert Karel Mm-hmm. 24:18.17 Philippe Boutros And it's because it is like, The selfishness of it is that it just helps us get our name out there. But there isn't any agenda beyond that. We just know that like we're doing something good, hopefully, and paving it forward. 24:30.42 Philippe Boutros um I've had people meet and get jobs out of that. I've had people say, I've made this really good connection in my town that I didn't know was here from this. Yeah, it's just it's been a nice way for some groups in tech that might not um like historically be as well represented get to know each other. 24:46.71 Philippe Boutros um And it's just every time you could just get off an hour long Zoom call with a bunch of strangers, you should break them up into groups of five or six if it starts to get beyond eight people because it's hard. Otherwise, everyone's just like listening to the one loud person talk like me right now. 25:02.58 Philippe Boutros And ah yeah, it is it's just feels really nice to just meet a bunch of nice people and then facilitate connection. 25:08.80 Robert Karel Yeah. So it sounds like this is really kind of a a brand awareness thing. you're built You're defining what your brand experience is, which is community building. 25:19.22 Philippe Boutros Yes. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 25:20.64 Robert Karel It's a community activity where leads could be a secondary benefit. But for now, it's you are a facilitator of this community. um So how do you attract to get the right people to join these events? 25:38.97 Philippe Boutros Yeah, um we started off just by asking the people we knew. We did, I would do this, like if you're in a different industry, there's going to be a few people that are just have large followings on LinkedIn or whatever, the like X or Blue Sky or whatever your environment is. 25:55.48 Philippe Boutros um Ask them to co-host and ask nothing else of them. Just say, I'm trying to do this thing for a community purpose. They have this incentive to do this sort of thing because they want to also keep furthering their own brand. 26:06.97 Philippe Boutros um And ah I think the most important thing is like, pick a few people who have people orbiting around them and have no sleaziness or ask of it beyond just genuinely trying to put on some sort of like nice community building event. 26:23.10 Philippe Boutros um Particularly we benefited from, and I'm sure this is the case and ah for other industries, we've benefited from the preponderance of remote workers who are especially like isolated um there's a lot of people who um you know never get to meet their co-workers in person or rarely do um and if particularly if they're the only person in their role inside of a company um it's tricky 26:50.20 Robert Karel Yeah, those sole marketers or sole product marketers that don't have a peer to bounce things off of. 26:58.33 Philippe Boutros yeah 26:58.68 Robert Karel um So let's let's move well let's end the question of like what's the most important thing you tell a founder before they plan to host their first event? and What's the best piece of advice you would give them as they have their silver silver bullet still in the back of their head, where it's like, this equals revenue? 27:21.08 Robert Karel Yeah. 27:21.71 Philippe Boutros Oh man. Okay. um I hope it's okay if I answer with two different things. 27:26.00 Robert Karel Yeah. 27:26.33 Philippe Boutros um The first one is one that I don't think they can truly answer without the second one, but the first one's probably a good one to have their mind around. What is the unique like thesis or hypothesis or whatever you have heading into this event? do you Why do you think it's going to be like people are going to be drawn to booth in particular? 27:44.47 Philippe Boutros why like What is the premise you are testing with this first one? um I say that because like ultimately, especially for early stage startups, any funding you have, your investors are funding you because they want you to learn with those dollars. 27:59.99 Philippe Boutros And the ideal is for you to have a knockout booth that gets dozens or hundreds of leads with like you know your perfect ICP. um The reality is that you will get some leads that are really good and you will probably want to go back and say, here we did this and here's what we learned and here's what we're doing next time. 28:17.57 Philippe Boutros It's easier to learn if you have a hypothesis you're testing against. So that was the first thing. What is your hypothesis around like the reason why you're gonna have an outsized impact from this spend? 28:28.34 Philippe Boutros The second thing is don't expect it to go well. like Have low expectations. um like You are heading into this as an experiment. um I'm not a I'm not a ah a historian of science, but I expect i would imagine that like the first space travel didn't go very well, the first submarine travel probably didn't go very well, the first like expeditions to you know into the Amazon probably didn't go very well. 28:57.14 Philippe Boutros um You're going into the unknown, and you're probably going to need to discover some things the hard way. um And yeah, if this is your last 20K that you're putting towards a booth, maybe don't do that. maybe Maybe invest in something different. 29:15.08 Robert Karel That's really good advice. 29:15.51 Philippe Boutros Yeah, that would be the advice I'd give. 29:18.55 Robert Karel Oh, please. 29:19.19 Philippe Boutros um I have one other thing that I've forgotten to mention on the thing. 29:21.72 Robert Karel oh this 29:22.97 Philippe Boutros um ah I talked earlier about how like we have a team with you know skill sets that have been really helpful. um i To shout out our like head of marketing in particular, Lottie Brinks. 29:33.86 Philippe Boutros Lottie came from a non-traditional background heading into this B2B tech marketing role. She has done quite a few things, one of which was work for i Imperfect Produce, where they used to have they used to do a ton of events, even though it was little bit more on the consumer side. 29:49.44 Philippe Boutros There was some like other partnerships in consumer. 29:49.86 Robert Karel Mm-hmm. 29:51.84 Philippe Boutros um Having somebody who knew how to make things happen, like getting the materials together, getting the booth things together, um and knew how to train the rest of the team on how to talk to people at conferences, because I have outstanding technologists who are not used to, you know, the booth scene, knew what kind of energy to bring. 30:11.16 Philippe Boutros um It is probably, if you have, you know, 25k, it's probably worth spending 5k having an advisor come and get you in shape to spend the rest that 20k, rather than, you know, that incremental 5k somewhere else. 30:25.06 Philippe Boutros That's been really helpful to us. 30:26.81 Robert Karel Yeah, and you know, they don't underestimate the logistics and project management skills to handle a very, even ah the smallest booth, if it's not in your backyard, there's a whole bunch of logistics and planning that needs to go into place pre-event, during event, post-event. 30:44.01 Philippe Boutros Yep. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Plan to have a shipping budget. You're going to need to move these things around, um 30:49.59 Robert Karel Right, to your point, or unless you want to spend top dollar on renting locally, right? 30:53.18 Philippe Boutros which which you should not. 30:54.97 Robert Karel which we previously discussed, although support your local unions. 30:59.48 Philippe Boutros Absolutely. Yep. 31:01.05 Robert Karel So um let's talk about online virtual type events. 31:05.66 Philippe Boutros Yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. 31:06.98 Robert Karel because you You talk a little bit about this, which which is great. Those are more community building type of experience. webinars, podcasts, yeah other other virtual forums. 31:17.50 Philippe Boutros ah yeah 31:20.48 Robert Karel There's so much noise today and competition today. you're you're They're getting more and more of a bad rap. They're cheap, but we're you know hearing things about quantity over quality, for example. is there so One, have you cracked the nut yet beyond the community building side of things in terms of leveraging virtual as a communication channel or a lead channel? 31:48.06 Robert Karel And then how are you balancing your in-person versus virtual balance? 31:53.50 Philippe Boutros Yeah, um setting aside the virtual community piece, the remote PMM hang, um which that is like an i we consider that like an unambiguous success and the failure there is not doing a good enough job of like remembering to do it. 32:09.08 Philippe Boutros So i I should take that as a to do from this call is to set up the one for April. um Setting that aside, ah podcasts have actually been a mixed bag for us. 32:20.02 Philippe Boutros I think ah we sponsored the really good podcast that is emerging with Elle Grossenbacher. I don't know if you know her. She's super smart, really good person, interesting podcast. And the premise was like real people's real experiences. So that sort of made sense for us to show up there. 32:35.74 Robert Karel Mm-hmm. 32:35.93 Philippe Boutros um When I've been on podcasts, it's always fun. It's often more fun when it's with a friend than other times, but it's always fun. And I have generally found that like, don't really know how, um i wouldn't necessarily think of like the podcast route as one where you're gonna like have a lot of people hear you and then show up and book a demo. I think it's more in the sort of the brand lift side. 32:58.14 Philippe Boutros um I will say i didn't realize how much podcast content was getting indexed by large language models. So some of the things I said on a podcast in like 2020, late 23 or 24, was using like at the time i was using brand names that we don't use anymore for some of our products. 33:13.66 Robert Karel Okay. 33:14.04 Philippe Boutros Um, those show up now when I do, when we're hiring for a role, people reference those product names that aren't anywhere else on the internet in like the LLM driven cover letters. which drives me crazy. Um, yeah, super, super weird. 33:26.39 Philippe Boutros Um, but, uh, podcasts, if there is a podcast that like hits your ICP perfectly. And, um, uh, if you have a way of getting on that, probably you should do that and don't say anything stupid. Um, uh, 33:42.01 Philippe Boutros We have had a different kind of online event go really well. And we've done a few of these before. There are a million webinars out there. um And we have sponsored or like or sponsored the like a webinar series before where we do this about every six months, um where the idea behind the series is interactive. 33:57.08 Robert Karel Yes. 34:02.74 Philippe Boutros So my theory is that like I've never watched a webinar. i've yeahve I've definitely never watched more than the first like four minutes of a webinar. And I do get the login after. um My theory has been, our theory has been that you should make it engaging and interactive for the audience. So we have done this model that's sort of like a like a um like a America's Got Talent. I forget if it's, is it called America's Got Talent? 34:28.50 Robert Karel Yeah. 34:29.32 Philippe Boutros Whatever's the thing where like you text in who you want. um It's like a role playing game where you as the audience are invested in following through the steps because you tell me or whoever the person is doing the webinar what their next action should be. 34:44.15 Philippe Boutros So the the one we've done has been, I'm a product marketer, I'm using my own product, I get a Slack message from my boss saying, the CEO of the company is really excited to see that messaging framework. 34:58.15 Philippe Boutros They're ready for you in 25 minutes. I hope you're ready. And the spoiler is that I have done none of it. 35:03.23 Robert Karel Bye. 35:03.67 Philippe Boutros The audience gets to choose if I work at OpenAI or Microsoft or Salesforce, and then what the product is and what the persona is and what the pain points are. And they're watching me use our own product to do that all the way through. um We've gotten tons of positive response from that, including like demos, books and things like that. said People have said it's the most engaging webinar format they've ever seen, which I feel like patting myself on the back too much with that. but i I only think that works because the bar is so low with webinars that if you can do something novel, it stands out. 35:36.02 Philippe Boutros um It's not like the first spot I would go to. Yeah. 35:39.83 Robert Karel Right. And, you know, well I think give yourself and the team credit for recognizing that the way to stand out is to do something different. And sometimes they sometimes it resonates, sometimes it doesn't. 35:49.67 Philippe Boutros Yeah. Crazy, right? 35:53.80 Robert Karel But going back to the trial and error recommendation and learn... 35:58.61 Philippe Boutros Yeah. 35:59.58 Robert Karel It's good advice because it takes time, but it's it is a relatively inexpensive channel that could, one, it certainly drives search results and content. 36:05.82 Philippe Boutros Yeah. Yeah. 36:09.98 Robert Karel So if nothing else, you're finding a way to get content out there because not everything could be a blog or a podcast or an ebook or whatever. But um but yeah, no, it's definitely hard to break through. Yeah. 36:24.43 Robert Karel I'm with you. I've watched maybe more than four minutes of more than one webinar, but i don't enjoy them typically. I'm usually watching them because I feel some responsibility to for whatever reason, whether I'm a customer or an analyst or a competitor or something. 36:40.21 Philippe Boutros Yeah. 36:40.95 Robert Karel I'm watching it for a reason. And do I usually get what I want out of it? 36:43.21 Philippe Boutros Yeah. 36:46.23 Philippe Boutros Yeah. but 36:46.91 Robert Karel Rarely. 36:47.83 Philippe Boutros yeah yeah yeah 36:49.98 Robert Karel So yeah I'd love to hear more about your team in terms of, you know, one of your early ah recommendations at the beginning of our episode was saying how it's really moved the needle once you brought in talented folks that have experience in different areas. So as a kind of a company that's been a couple years old now and you're beginning to scale up and, you know, bring in more full-time staff, you what were your early marketer skillsets that you were looking for? 37:20.41 Robert Karel What were those disciplines that you said, okay, I'm ready for a full-time investment in X, Y, and Z skills, because other B2B tech ah companies are also gonna hit that stage where, okay, who's my first marketing hire, et cetera. 37:35.47 Philippe Boutros Yeah, yeah. Great question. And I'm thinking, so we we turned three on April 10th, which is ridiculous. 37:44.84 Robert Karel Almost happy birthday. 37:46.17 Philippe Boutros Yeah, almost thank you. And the, hopefully you can cut out when I pause and think for like 10 seconds in a row, but yeah, I created them. 37:55.42 Robert Karel um i really I've gotten really good at cutting out buzzes because I'm really good at the buzzes. ah 38:00.95 Philippe Boutros and and Yeah, the the the the first skill, so we have on the go to market side, we have a head of marketing, a founding product marketer, a founding seller, and two BDRs, each of whom are fantastic. 38:17.40 Philippe Boutros We, the first person was the head of marketing and the skillset I looked for there in particular was a, I needed a generalist, someone who knew how to do a lot of different things really well. 38:29.27 Philippe Boutros Um, uh, because I knew how to do very few things, regardless of well or not, I needed someone who knew how to do these things. I particularly looked from a personality standpoint for somebody who could like run this, like run it like the Navy, like assuming that the Navy's run well. 38:47.70 Philippe Boutros i needed I needed this to be like on on rails um because I, like earlier I talked about how events were an experiment at the beginning. You as an early founder always running experiments. 38:59.70 Philippe Boutros Ultimately, if you're a scientist yeah and you're running experiments, you need to measure them and track if it's going well or not. need to build a thesis and a structure around all this. And as we are taking these money these these dollars and setting them on fire, 39:13.56 Philippe Boutros You want somebody who's there at the end of the day to like show you a dashboard and say, this worked or this did not, and here's why. um Yeah, so the first first person that we wanted to hire was someone who could go build a program out of this. um It helped. 39:23.67 Robert Karel Can I ask about that first hire, kind of the generalist? 39:24.82 Philippe Boutros Go ahead. 39:27.03 Robert Karel um very often it's viewed as unicorn hunting, you know, in that i mean do they have expertise and everything? 39:32.88 Philippe Boutros Yeah. 39:35.58 Robert Karel More often than not, you have a T-shaped person that has maybe a depth of experience in one area, but has had exposure or some experiences. Like, so yeah did you actually find that unicorn or did you look for someone that you felt fully confident could handle full stack, but had some depth in a certain area or two? 39:59.29 Philippe Boutros Yeah, I think um because i I am a bit of a specialist, like I have been in this space for a long time, i know this problem set really well, and I had a strong opinion around and still do around what we're building. 40:11.95 Robert Karel Mm-hmm. 40:11.99 Philippe Boutros um The part that I was most comfortable, like having the U-shaped marketer maybe, but not an M-shaped marketer, like the Lottie is not a product marketer by background. 40:12.09 Robert Karel Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 40:25.37 Philippe Boutros but has a phenomenal background in everything design and brand and then also in like program management performance. um And i I felt like I could duct tape together the PMM side of it until we grew large enough to bring on a PMM founder. 40:41.08 Philippe Boutros which we ended up doing. But yeah, that like the company would not be where it is without like her having been in that role in the first year while we went from zero brand, zero anything to actually having a presence and a coherent structure around how we do things. Yeah. 40:57.11 Robert Karel Right. Well, let me ask before we get to the other team, you happen to be ah unique founder because you actually have a marketing background. 40:57.32 Philippe Boutros Yeah. 41:07.80 Robert Karel relative to a lot of other early stage founders, maybe just product or engineering experts that maybe don't have a whole lot of marketing. 41:14.54 Philippe Boutros Yeah. 41:17.57 Robert Karel You're kind of, you know, the founding product marketer, forget wise. 41:22.01 Philippe Boutros Yeah. 41:23.61 Robert Karel Do you view, I'm not saying, you know, pick your favorite child, um although go for it if you want to, but no. ah But at early stage, 41:30.70 Philippe Boutros I have one kid, so it's easy. 41:35.58 Robert Karel is product marketing or kind of the the brand and digital side of things, growth side of things, which is that first hire if I'm an engineer or I'm a product person that has zero marketing leadership experience? 41:51.29 Philippe Boutros I, ah GetWhys is an exception because of where I came from, to your point. I strongly believe the first marketing hire that anyone should make, if you're especially if you're like more of a technologist by background, should be product marketing. 42:05.76 Philippe Boutros Ideally, they can stretch to some other parts of it, but there's you are just setting your money on fire if you don't have coherence around your messaging and positioning. um I also think it is really, um and I've seen this before, like I have... 42:21.11 Philippe Boutros close experience with really well-funded companies that have spen invested a lot into demand gen and conferences, hosting their own conferences um and hiring large sales teams with like well-renowned sellers, but never having hired a product marketer on board. and as a result of that, never like never making their revenue goals. 42:42.84 Philippe Boutros um I also think as if if you're the founder of an early stage startup, one of the hardest hires for you to grok with is the product marketer, because it's the first time that you are handing off, you need to translate the messiness in your own head around what you're building and how you talk about it to somebody whose job it is to simplify. 43:01.98 Philippe Boutros And that simplification can be really uncomfortable sometimes. 43:02.16 Robert Karel Yes. 43:05.21 Robert Karel yes 43:05.46 Philippe Boutros because you you want to say yes and to everything else, because every founder is like an improv person and you you can't. So the earlier you start doing that and like living with that discomfort, I think the easier it is because like all uncomfortable things are things you should do early. 43:22.74 Philippe Boutros um 43:22.74 Robert Karel Yeah, I think it's really a well good advice and opinion, but also just a self-awareness thing for founders that I built this. 43:35.82 Robert Karel Of course, I know what it does and who it's for because I built it for someone. 43:39.46 Philippe Boutros Yeah. Yeah. No. 43:40.92 Robert Karel But That's not what marketing inc does. Marketing focuses and targets and builds programs and strategies. It's not about the product. 43:53.02 Robert Karel It's about the value you get from it. And that's not necessarily that leap that the founder is, to your point, comfortable making. Because I don't want to limit what my thing could do because my thing could do so much. 44:07.32 Philippe Boutros We, we have new messaging on our site as of this morning. 44:10.87 Robert Karel Oh, exciting. 44:11.06 Philippe Boutros i didn't, I didn't, I looked at it, but I didn't, I didn't touch it. Product marketer wrote it. It's so much better. It makes sense. And, um, yeah, I think founder founders have a hard time recognizing the forest for the trees problem that they are the cause of. 44:23.51 Robert Karel a 44:25.78 Philippe Boutros And, um, yeah, the product marketers there to be really helpful with that. 44:30.84 Robert Karel And so let's talk. So we're talking about the team of skills and now you've got some really wonderful people that are helping to scale you with their own skills. But you're also an AI native company with an AI product that I... 44:43.77 Robert Karel I know you're already using internally plenty because you have the benefit of ah you know drinking your own champagne to get a lot of these messaging and value props um out to market. 44:54.38 Philippe Boutros Yeah. 44:56.22 Robert Karel Where are you looking you know as you expand beyond what GetWhys is as a technology could support from a demand gen and event management and marketing ops and all these other pieces of the go to market puzzle? 45:09.12 Robert Karel Where are you guys at your stage kind of looking at AI and other automation? I don't want to limit to AI because it's ah it's a catch all, but just the ability to automate and scale things efficiently with quality and trust. 45:16.79 Philippe Boutros yeah 45:22.36 Philippe Boutros Yeah, um we're investing a lot into what we call insight-led growth. So those folders that we're handing out to people at the conference, full of information that's interesting to them. um That's been our entire outbound strategy from the beginning. 45:35.22 Robert Karel Mm-hmm. 45:35.32 Philippe Boutros More than almost half of our deals are influenced by them. like That shows up because at some point someone gets a message that says something interesting, which is really hard to do with outbound. Um, we, that has been an entirely manual process to date. 45:49.30 Philippe Boutros Started off with me being the one to use our own system to then go get, try to guess what Rob would find interesting and then write that email and then send that email. Um, right now, Matt and Katie, our BDRs have been doing that and they're doing a great job, but we finally have the engineering time to not only build things for our customers, but also build things for our internal team. 46:08.70 Philippe Boutros Um, so we're investing a lot into automating our, um, So it's not just outbound for us. You'll see some products on our site that will be more interactive that use our own dataset. um We'll be building some other experiences around insight-led growth, quote unquote. 46:23.61 Philippe Boutros But um yeah, that we're spending more time there. The contrarian thing that perhaps will surprise you or maybe not, um we have found ourselves moving away from the like sexy AI native CRM, right? or AI native, you know, CMS system or whatever, because ah we can't really find the time and expertise to just dink around in it all day. I think it's really like cloud code, for example, we all have cloud code, we're all using it. 46:55.00 Philippe Boutros um It's really easy to go spend a lot of time tinkering and not actually getting the actual job done that you're supposed to be doing. We moved from a very well-funded, well-heard of CRM to HubSpot. 47:11.34 Philippe Boutros HubSpot. And we're happy we made that change because it's just, this is a solid foundation that we can go build other things on top of, but we don't have ti like we don't have time to just go be configuring things all day. 47:23.54 Philippe Boutros And yeah, that might be ah deeply controversial, but it's been like these systems of record sort of exist for a reason. 47:24.18 Robert Karel Yeah. 47:32.66 Philippe Boutros And um I think productivity porn is a real problem. 47:37.56 Robert Karel Yeah, and i I think it's a really great point when with AI is like, when you could do anything, are you accomplishing nothing? 47:45.42 Philippe Boutros Yeah. 47:45.98 Robert Karel Because there's, you know, we're all playing with it. We're all building apps. We're all automating things that maybe don't need to be automated right now. 47:51.36 Philippe Boutros Yeah. 47:54.07 Robert Karel Or maybe are you're spending so much time automating it, you're not even asking the question, was this a good process in the first place before I start automating something? 48:03.64 Philippe Boutros hey yeah I talked to a customer the other day who said, oh, and ah without going into too much detail uh they they were saying like oh this thing that you guys have been building i've actually been able to build part of it on my own and like talked about it for a while and then i got to the end and said so or he got to the end of it and i said like great like how much are you using it like is it working he's like no i can't get the integration to work it's like well you just spent two days building this thing like you could you could have been doing your job um i forget i forget if it's clayton christensen 48:26.00 Robert Karel Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 48:35.86 Philippe Boutros Robert Porter, whatever his name is, who talks about this concept of like core competencies. We have one core competency as a company. It's reflecting back interesting insights to people. 48:48.15 Philippe Boutros That's where we're going to try to dump all every bit of AI savvy that we can. I'm not trying to innovate in any other part of the company. I just want to do things that work well, that we're good at. We're just going to go all in on that. Yeah. 48:59.77 Robert Karel Yeah, and I think there's two interesting points. One, we're we're back in the build versus by a question, which was huge with system integrators and when ERP and CRM and all these things were really these siloed um you know pillars that you know didn't talk to each other well. 49:07.27 Philippe Boutros Yep. Mm-hmm. 49:18.40 Robert Karel So all of these integration points and gaps and chasms between these systems of record, there was just all this green field of, well, how do I get X to happen? 49:31.96 Robert Karel And there was a whole lot of build until SaaS world and suddenly everyone had an app to fill in all those gaps. So build became expensive and non-sustainable. 49:38.59 Philippe Boutros Yeah. 49:42.09 Robert Karel We're back into build though with AI, which is, is it going to be sustainable or is it going to be exactly the same problem back in the day? It's not sustainable. Who's maintaining it and administrating it and evolving it as your business evolves? 49:56.98 Philippe Boutros I think there is no question that it's not going to be maintainable in this like dream state where you can you know to build everything from scratch. It is really cool to see how quickly things can be built. 50:10.04 Philippe Boutros um And yeah, I think the the challenge for whether you're a founder, really whatever your role is, like the challenge for you is to think about if what you're building is actually like a good use of your time. 50:20.82 Philippe Boutros um we are We are limited by our like the one thing you can't does Doesn't matter how much money Sam Altman raises, like you can't create more time. And yeah, I just want to spend that wisely. 50:32.76 Robert Karel I think that's ah great advice and a great way to end it I think this was really valuable that you're kind of sharing what's working and some of the early mistakes and redirects that you did. And um ah you can learn more about ah GetWhys at GetWhys.io. 50:51.51 Robert Karel And I highly recommend, especially product marketers out there. I'm a big fan. I think it's such a cool, such a cool solution that you're building and i wish you all ah luck in the world. 51:01.26 Philippe Boutros Thank you. 51:03.38 Robert Karel And I really appreciate you being here. 51:05.50 Philippe Boutros Thanks so much. Thanks for having us. Super fun. Yeah, I look forward to telling you all the mistakes we learned this year, next year. 51:12.21 Robert Karel That would be part two. 51:13.82 Philippe Boutros Yeah, thanks. right.