Transition of founder from agency to build a SaaS product

Yash from Momentum (00:00)
Hello, and welcome back to Building Momentum, the show where we peel back the curtain on the exciting and often chaotic world of building a successful SaaS business. I'm Yash, your host for this show, where every episode we bring you the stories and strategies of founders who've been in the trenches conquering churn, scaling their teams, and building products that people and businesses love.

In this episode, we'll be chatting with Pierre Landoin CEO at Icypeas .com. They are a powerful email discovery platform that can help you find verified emails and lower your bounce rate. And we are excited to hear their story and the lessons that they've learned along the way as well. We'll be dissecting the wins, the losses, and everything in between. So buckle up, grab your headphones, and get ready to dive into the world of SaaS founders. Hey, Pierre, thank you for joining in. How are you doing today?

Pierre Landoin (Icypeas) (00:47)
Hi, Yash Thank you very much for having me on your podcast. I'm very good. What about you?

Yash from Momentum (00:52)
Awesome. I'm doing great as well. And again, thank you for joining in. So starting off, right? So just tell us a little bit about Icypeas what you're doing, what's the product all about, how did you start? Give us a stock of what you're doing at Icypeas.

Pierre Landoin (Icypeas) (01:07)
Okay, so Icypeas, as you previously said, is an email finder tool. So you can use our platform to upload a prospect list with first names, last names, and company names. And based on that, we'll be able to retrieve a large amount of emails to let you reach out those prospects.

Yash from Momentum (01:29)
nice here. Awesome. And so that's great to know. So essentially, one of the challenges with a platform like Icypeas is that an email finder tool is essentially useful for almost everyone. Almost every company has a sales department. Almost every sales department does cold outbound. And they would require a platform like Icypeas to do email discovery. How do you segment that market? How do you identify?

Who are the lower hanging fruits? How do you go after them? What's your process? How does that look like?

Pierre Landoin (Icypeas) (02:02)
That's a very good question, actually. At the very beginning of Icypeas, and we are one year old, so it's still young, but at the very beginning, we were exploring many different options in terms of market segmentations. So we explored many different targets. Very quickly, it appeared to us that the Legion agencies were the low -hanging fruits, as you said.

because they have a huge need of emails in high volumes and they care about the price for that. So this is exactly what we offer, like very good quality emails, verified emails that don't bounce or bounce like very rarely at a very cost -effective price. So that's the first market segment which responded very well.

to our product. But there are also some other segments. For example, the startups who are just starting their cold outbound, they are looking for their stack of tools for that. And they care also about cost effectiveness because as they are starting, they don't have like very huge budget. And that's where Icypeas is very good because we are very budget friendly.

Yash from Momentum (03:12)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

Pierre Landoin (Icypeas) (03:29)
So yeah, those startups are an interesting segment too, but there are many other segments that respond more or less well, depending on the maturity of the company. So actually, we sell also to a large variety of customers in the end. Maybe I'm forgetting about one other segment, which is actually very important to us. So I would like to mention that.

Yash from Momentum (03:30)
Yeah.

Pierre Landoin (Icypeas) (03:56)
we also sell to sales platforms. So that's platforms that are actually sales tech products. And they integrate Icypeas into their own product using our API. For example, we work with Clay. You may have heard about clay .com, which is very trendy these days. We also, sorry.

Yash from Momentum (04:17)
Yeah. Yeah. It's the flavor of the season. Yeah. It is clay .com is the flavor of the season. I mean, almost everyone is talking about clay. Yeah.

Pierre Landoin (Icypeas) (04:26)
exactly. So we are integrated by Clay and we are integrated in their own internal waterfall as well. We work also with other platforms like Lemlist, Captain Data, like Growth Machine, and many other platforms.

Yash from Momentum (04:45)
it's very interesting, right? So you have B2B2B, and then you have B2B as well, right? And this question is actually really near to my heart, primarily because at ClientJoy also, we were always facing this conundrum. Because when we say that, so at ClientJoy, it was a CRM for agencies and freelancers, which got acquired earlier this year.

Pierre Landoin (Icypeas) (04:48)
Exactly.

Yash from Momentum (05:10)
And whenever we used to say to our marketing team or internal growth team that, hey, any agency can use the platform, it was equivalent to saying that if anything is for everyone, then you're essentially building nothing for no one. Because you don't know who to target and where to target and what are their interests and how do you design cohorts and things like that as well. And I'll have a longer.

sort of question to this, because this also ties down to another question that our previous guest has had asked. So I'll be bringing this towards the end of the episode as well. One of the interesting things that I noticed while I was going through your LinkedIn and even our pre -interview conversation was that there was a while, a couple of years back when you were doing two things at once. You were running a product as well as an agency, both of them you were doing together. And then now,

you are only running the product, right, which is Icypeas, and stop the agency operations, right? So can you talk a little bit about that, how it was running both of them at once, and then transitioning from an agency to a product, and what are the challenges that a founder faces? If you can talk a little bit.

Pierre Landoin (Icypeas) (06:23)
All right. So seven years ago, I co -founded a communication agency. We grew this agency for several years. During this time, I had to prospect a lot because this agency sells services that are just like one -time services. They are not recurring services.

So every year we had to find new clients for our services. That's how I started to prospect intensely. And at that time, I discovered all the sales automation tools that were popping up everywhere a few years ago. I was very excited about that. I got very enthusiastic about this new way of making sales.

soon I realized that the existing tools at the time, they were kept in terms of email discovery. The email finder tools that I was using were not very good, but that was the beginning of this new industry. So.

I understand that. I understand that they were pioneering the path. But still, it was a bit frustrating for me to get rid of the two thirds of my list when I was using those tools. So I tried to figure out how I could go further. Since I had some web developers in my team, in my agency at the time, we developed scripts to get more emails than

what the existing tools were able to provide. And after a few years, we figured out that we had developed a bunch of scripts that were actually doing very well in comparison to those tools, the existing tools. So we decided that we had a good opportunity to create a SAS. And we decided to split the team. And.

to package all these scripts into a self -serve SAS. That's how we made the switch. But there is also another level of understanding on that switch, which is that after a few years of running an agency, I faced the difficulties of running an agency, which are you are very dependent on your teammates, on your employees. It requires...

a large amount of management time. And also, especially because we are in the communication sector, we were very dependent on the goodwill of our clients. By that, I mean that in 2020, as you remember, the whole world faced a huge crisis. And at that time, in France at least,

Yash from Momentum (09:18)
Hmm.

Yeah. Yeah.

Pierre Landoin (Icypeas) (09:29)
the large companies we were working with, they decided to reduce significantly the budgets they had for communication because communications is often perceived as a nice to have, but not like a core important service. So that's how we really experienced that we were heavily dependent on a few large enterprises. And so,

Yash from Momentum (09:37)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Pierre Landoin (Icypeas) (09:58)
Those two things, the dependency on human labor and also the dependency on a few clients, pushed me to embrace and look for a different business model where I would be more product -based. And this obviously answers my two challenges, because when you have a product, you work with robots mainly and not that much with a...

Yash from Momentum (10:18)
Yeah.

Pierre Landoin (Icypeas) (10:23)
human labor. And also you face a mass market or at least a more like a

a more massive market than when you have just 10 or 20 clients. So you're less dependent on your clients as well. And actually, this is what I truly enjoy now with Icypeas because those two advantages are really very powerful in terms of peace of mind and in terms of revenue stability.

Yash from Momentum (10:31)
Yeah.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I'm so glad you mentioned that because it's a very similar journey for us as well. So if I were to try to summarize, I think what we're saying is that you identified or faced a problem with early stage email discovery platforms six, seven years ago, maybe a little more. And then essentially on the side, spent years and years with your team.

to build better scripts, to build scrapers. And it was not being done to eventually get to this point. You were happily running the agency, and then on the side, you were doing this for a while. And then during COVID, you essentially realized that the scripts that you have written are actually performing better than the email discovery tools of the day.

And so you decided to launch a platform. And then the second reason being that agencies inherently are not scalable in the sense that you can scale an agency. But the amount of input that needs to go into an agency is proportional to the output that your agency can generate, which is not true in case of running a product. So you can be a 10 -people team and serve 10 customers. And the same 10 -people team can serve 1 ,000 customers.

and significantly lesser dependency on each client that you have and so on and so forth. So that's very interesting. That's how a lot of SaaS companies are built as well. Very, very similar story. So one of the other things that I want to understand from you is that at Momentum also we have an outbound team that reaches out, uses cold emails and things like that. And we've explored a host of other

tools and platforms. One of the things that I found as a common theme amongst all the tools and platforms is that the marketing team or the people who are writing copy for the home page or the landing page, they promise the moon. And so almost all of your competitors are promising that all of them have best email discovery rates and low bounce rates. And in cases where the market has

a lot of like you have a lot of competition and and your competition is making the same promises. How do you stand out? How do you how do you showcase that you are that you are better than this is another question that we also ourselves grappled with. The CRM is is if there's anything more crowded than email discovery, it's a CRM. So so how do you how do you handle that? How do you manage that?

Pierre Landoin (Icypeas) (13:32)
OK, so about that, first of all, I must confess that my first idea on that topic was wrong. When we started Icypeas, I thought that all our first customers or all our first free users would perform tests on our platforms to figure out if we are actually better or not comparing to the competition. And I was very surprised to see that actually people don't test.

They don't test because they have good reasons not to do so. They don't have time, actually. And they don't want to spend time and money on buying different subscriptions and making tests. They believe it's not their job to do so. And I actually now agree with that. But I thought I could rely at first. I thought that it would be a... Yeah, I thought that I could rely on people making tests. Really? No. That was a bad idea. So...

Yash from Momentum (14:26)
Yeah.

Pierre Landoin (Icypeas) (14:29)
We soon discovered that people rely on the marketing that they hear about and the reputation. So this makes us the task more difficult because we are actually really better than the competition, like truly better. But people don't see that. It's hard.

Yash from Momentum (14:43)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Pierre Landoin (Icypeas) (14:51)
for them to trust me instead of anyone else, because as you said, everyone is making the same promise. So.

Yash from Momentum (14:57)
Yeah, yeah. So then it eventually becomes who becomes about who has a bigger microphone. So yeah.

Pierre Landoin (Icypeas) (15:03)
Yeah, exactly. So it's really a distribution challenge. And if you have a very good distribution machine and large budgets in terms of marketing, you will be heard more than actually products that could be, that do perform better. But that's fine. That's the game. So since you cannot change the game's rules, you have to play by the rules. So at first, I...

Yash from Momentum (15:07)
Yeah.

Pierre Landoin (Icypeas) (15:32)
I decided to publish benchmarks. And by contrast with the competition, when I publish a benchmark, I open source all the data sets that I have used. So basically, I create a list of, let's say, 500 or 1 ,000 prospects that I scrape randomly on LinkedIn. And then I upload this list on my email finder and on

other email finders as well. I pay for the credits on the other email finder's tools. And then I publish all the results, like my processed file and also the processed file processed by other email finders. So I try to create transparency on the market by open sourcing those data sets. And this makes a big difference with all the other benchmarks, which are black boxes.

People say they are the best, but you have no way to check the data. So I try to create trust using that. But even that, it's not working very well, to be honest. So what I try to do is that I try to convince my users to become ambassadors.

But here again, there is another challenge. For a lot of our users, we are actually their secret sauce or one of their secret sauces. So they don't want to share the fact that they are good.

Yash from Momentum (16:57)
Yeah, because most of your customers are lead gen agencies, right? And lead gen agencies performing better for their clients because they've gotten a good product that is underlying their service and they don't want to share it. That's an interesting problem to solve.

Pierre Landoin (Icypeas) (17:03)
Exactly.

Exactly. Yeah. So basically, what's left for us is that to invest marketing budgets. So in the future, we plan to invest some budgets with influencers, for example, to sponsor some influencers for them to speak about our products. But really, it's a pity not to be able to rely on the fact that our product is just better. But that's the way it is.

Yash from Momentum (17:37)
Yeah, that's the game. This brings back to a joke that we internally had, which is what you also mentioned. So KFC, one of the very famous things that KFC says is that we have 13 herbs and spices. That's their secret sauce to making finger licking good chicken.

And I always felt bad for those 13 herbs and spices because we know that they use 13 herbs and spices, but we don't know which one are those. So you're one of those for your customers. So you're one of those herbs and spices for your customers which they don't want to reveal because they are getting results using Icypeas. The other question that I have for you is that...

In a team that, in the scale of the team that you have versus the team size that your competition has, I'm sure that people in your team are playing multiple roles, including yourself. And how do you look at prioritization? So I'm sure that there is a person in your team who's doing some amount of customer support, some amount of copy for the website, some amount of testing for the product, and all of those things. So how do you?

How do you prioritize what are the things that you should work on? How do you go about that?

Pierre Landoin (Icypeas) (19:02)
I believe it's rather a weakness than a strength for us, the skill of prioritization. So I'm not like a good role model for that. But basically how we work about that is that we just try to, we are a very small team, so it makes things easier. But we try to just prioritize,

having in mind two things. The long term, we favor the long term over the short term because we believe we are here in that space for a long time. We played the long game. We don't want to make a coup. And the second thing is that we take very seriously into consideration revenue because we believe that revenue is a...

Yash from Momentum (19:37)
Mm -hmm.

Hmm?

Yeah.

Pierre Landoin (Icypeas) (19:57)
an objective way to feel the market adherence, the market interest for our product. And also, it's the fuel that you have in your own machine to keep your machine running. So when we hesitate between different tasks, we try to look at them in the light of both revenue and the long term, what's the best for the long term. Besides that, we have some...

Yash from Momentum (20:03)
Mm -hmm. Got it.

Yeah. Yeah.

Pierre Landoin (Icypeas) (20:26)
rituals, for example, every day we have a daily meeting at the start of the day. So at that time, everyone is sharing what he did yesterday, the day before, and what he is going to do for the day coming. So it's not standing, we are sitting, but yeah, it's this kind of ritual, absolutely.

Yash from Momentum (20:31)
huh.

like a daily stand up or something like that.

Sure, sure, yeah.

Pierre Landoin (Icypeas) (20:52)
And that's actually a meeting where we discuss priorities. Because sometimes we understand that, for example, my CTO will work on this or that. And for me, it's a good opportunity to question that, to challenge that, to make sure that's the best way to keep going. And he does the same with me as well. And we do the same with our junior people. Yeah.

Yash from Momentum (21:18)
All right, interesting. And so this brings me to my last question, which is not actually my question, but a question that was asked by a previous guest. And that question is, is that at what point or what metric or what indications do you look for in your business or in any business, any SaaS product?

where you are able to differentiate between, hey, you know, if this metric is not hit, or if these things are not indicated, I need to niche down on my market versus if this metric or these indications appear or occur, then I need to go wider on the market, which is identify similar adjacent to use cases, and then address those points of the market as well.

So how are you thinking about it?

Pierre Landoin (Icypeas) (22:10)
About niching down, for me, it's really a matter of acquisition, not a matter of conversion, monetization, or retention. To my understanding, based on my experience, you have to niche down when you face difficulties in your customer acquisition, so at the top of your funnel.

I would not consider niching down to solve the other problems or the other steps of the funeral I mentioned. But obviously, if you face some difficulties to attract people and to get interest from people, you may be seen as too generic, too not specifically designed for this segment of market. So that's why I'm saying that.

niching down could be a response to that. It's not the only response you have to consider because when you face customer acquisition problems, there are many other things to consider. You might think of, for example, trying different channels, trying to work on your segment and channel fit to improve your copywriting, et cetera. But...

Yash from Momentum (23:09)
sure.

Yeah. Yeah.

Pierre Landoin (Icypeas) (23:32)
niching down can be a part of the response for that.

Yash from Momentum (23:37)
Awesome, interesting. As we have the tradition, thank you for answering that question. That question, by the way, was by Josiah, who's founder of MyMarky, who was there in the previous episode. And as tradition goes, what's your question for the next guest that we have on the show? What's the question that you're battling with?

Pierre Landoin (Icypeas) (23:56)
OK. I'm very interested in content creation. So we are trying to improve our social presence on LinkedIn, for example, and YouTube as well. So my question is, what are the best practices you would recommend to build a content creation machine using the latest tools?

Yash from Momentum (24:00)
huh.

Pierre Landoin (Icypeas) (24:20)
AI, automated workflows, et cetera. That's a point I'm very interested in. Especially if you look at the blog posts, I feel that more and more people are smartly using AI to produce blog posts. But I am suspicious about how Google and the other such engines will handle that.

Yash from Momentum (24:38)
Mm -hmm.

Pierre Landoin (Icypeas) (24:47)
It's a dangerous game because if you are considered as too heavily relying on AI by those sentient lines, you might be punished for that. So that's my first question. May I ask more than one question? Okay. So another question that I would be very interested in discussing is about to what extent...

Yash from Momentum (24:47)
Yeah. Yeah.

Absolutely.

Pierre Landoin (Icypeas) (25:11)
you must invest time in user research. When you build a product, you have to keep talking with your users to understand how you must conduct your own map, your product roadmap, what are the next features you must develop, how you should prioritize that. But it's an endless task, actually. You can spend your whole life speaking to your users. So what's the limit? How do you frame?

Yash from Momentum (25:35)
Yeah. Yeah.

Pierre Landoin (Icypeas) (25:40)
the time you will invest in user research.

Yash from Momentum (25:43)
That's an interesting one as well. And in my limited experience, there's no right answer to this. But there could be a couple of approaches that I will ask. We have our next guest. We'll be recording with them in a couple of days. And I'll share with you what they have to say. And I'll share your answer with Josiah as well. With that, here we come towards the end of this conversation. And thank you for joining in. If you want to.

If you want to get yourself a platform that helps you discover more accurate email addresses at lower the cost to reduce your bounce rates, do check out Icypeas. We will be linking them in the description of wherever you are listening or watching this, or Spotify or YouTube music or YouTube, wherever you are finding this episode. I would like to thank everyone for joining in. And with that, thank you. Thank you, Pierre

Pierre Landoin (Icypeas) (26:37)
You're very welcome. Thank you for having me. And I hope that this conversation will help some other founders.

Yash from Momentum (26:44)
Absolutely. Bye.

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