a lot of people think that if you come up with a really good idea that's all you need but you need to understand isra competition who has done this before have they been successful if not why not why would you be more successful than other people you really need to deeply understand why you will be better than them and how you will be better than them and you don't understand why you're building when you're building it you can't be successful hi everyone I'm sheny co-founder in C at merch we help companies add Integrations through products
really easily across categories including Hrs ATS accounting serum ticketing file storage and marketing automation we've raised $75 million from investors including Excel Nea and addition and we're currently operating in New York City San Francisco and [Music] Berlin oh my gosh trying to get your first customers is so painful we spent a long time building in stealth before we started fundraising we were starting to build a product and then once we fundraised we continued building the product and we actually didn't launch for a year or so and once you come out of steth you just expect
all the customers to come and they don't so we were basically outbound begging people to take a chance on us and to try our product out and those early customer sales processes taught me a lot about what questions people would ask and I think one thing that Gil and I did really well was we really packed our calendars with as many sales calls as possible so we were pretty much like from 10:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. both of us just on calls it was a really tough period in our life um we were just in
phone booths all day on calls and back to back to back but it's it was a really great muscle for just hearing the same call over and over again AB testing different pitches and seeing how people reacted also just seeing the wide variety of questions that people might ask so by the time we hired our first salesperson we were able to teach him the answers to the questions that we knew were always going to get asked if we hadn't done that I think it would have been really hard for us to ramp our first salesperson
we wouldn't know what questions would come we wouldn't know how to answer them and so by the time he came we were able to say hey this is the way that customers really like this is what really resonates with them this is what you shouldn't say so I think it was really helpful for me and Gil to just get those first reps in because it made it so that the first salesperson that came in and head of sales he was really prepped and he was he was set up for success to be honest we found
product Market fit pretty early on I think the process of finding product Market fit actually mostly happened before we even started the companies user interviews getting validation from people and how much they would spend money all the research had really happened before we even started building I just didn't want us to start building the product and figuring it out later I wanted us to do the research up front and we probably spent six to nine months of just doing user research before we quit our jobs a lot of people think that if you come up
with a really good idea that's all you need but you need to understand isra competition who has done this before have they been successful if not why not why would you be more successful than other people also the chances of you thinking of an idea that no one else has thought of before is extremely unlikely probably someone else has tried this before and they probably haven't unsuccess successful if you haven't heard of them or they're maybe in the early parts of the journey so you really need to deeply understand why you will be better than
them and how you will be better than them so we started every week and we would spend a day together just reading up on the industry trying to better understand it trying to better understand why companies out there that were weren't solving this problem and if they were trying to why it wasn't quite the right solution so I think the research is so so so important because if you're not opinionated about it and you don't understand why you're building when you're building it you can't be successful I think a consistent characteristic of billion dollar companies
is successfully operating at scale with each team operating on its own so what that means is that each manager is successful at operating their team and the manager about that as well there's no individual that needs to contribute a ton in order to make the company successful the teams are just operating at skill on their own and that's really hard to achieve especially from an earlier stage where each individual is the one that's contributing a lot to the company so I think that transformation from individuals contributing a lot to the company to each team operating
autonomously and operating on their own cross functionally that's the goal but it's hard to do it's not always natural for friends to turn into co-founders and you really have to have a foundation of trust you also have to have complimentary Skillet my co-founder is a genius he is the best software engineer I know even to this day Gil and I knew each other from freshman year of college we met in orientation and then we were in all the same computer science class that's at Columbia and so we knew each other pretty well socially but we
were also fortunate enough to be on engineering student council together in college and that actually became a pretty helpful proxy for what it would be like to work together we were class president and vice president our senior year and after school we kept in contact and Gil and I naturally just living our parallel lives ended up getting skill sets that really worked well together I'm kind of like a master of none and I just I know a lot of things I can code I can sell do Financial forecasting but Gil is like the best software
engineer ever and he's a great people leader and I felt like the combination of the two would actually be a really great pair the advantages are it's just really fun everyone that we've hired is so great we have such a good time at work and a part of that is because Gil and I are good friends like we just really wanted to make sure like the environment around us replicated how much fun we had together and it seems like so far we've been able to scale that which is great disadvantages are that your friendship does
change forever it's great because it's more textured and it's deeper but you probably don't want to hang out on the weekends all the time together because you're always together the weekday you just end up like having a friendship that's mostly just like okay it's much more like you want to just hang out you want to have a good time but then now it's almost like you have like a kid together and you always are caring about this kid and you want to talk about this kid together and that's the company and a disadvantage of that
is just like your friendship completely changes one thing that has helped a lot with the really hard parts of being a Founder is just making friends who are peers I have a really great group of female founder friends in New York City that I made after I started merge and we just talk about everything like everything bad especially and it's really hard to break that barrier with a lot of Founders because people just don't want to share that kind of information it's very very sensitive like you don't want to share your numbers you don't want
to share like things that are going badly you don't want to share about people who hate you you don't want to share about customers that hate you but like having people that you can talk about that with really makes it easier because everyone's going through the same thing and everyone hates their lives and I think just once you realize that every founder journey is really painful and that no one has it easy it just makes it a lot it makes it a lot better I think one thing that I've learned is as I'm living through
life I'm not really grateful for the time that I'm currently in but then as time passes and I'm in the following year I look back and I'm like wow that was such a great time period and that actually has consistently happened every year now and so now I've realized like I'm currently living in a time that I will like look very fondly on in the future and at some point like this journey with merge will end and I'll be really really sad about it so I think right now I'm just really trying to like appreciate
every single day as much as possible [Music]
