Yash From Momentum (00:00)
Welcome back to Building Momentum, the show where we peel back the curtain on the exciting and often chaotic world of building a successful technology business. I'm Yash, your host for this show where every episode we bring you the stories and strategies of people who've been in the trenches, conquering terms, scaling their teams and building products that people and businesses love. In this episode, we'll be chatting with David from Relato. Relato is the easiest way to manage content operations for brands, agencies and freelancers.
We're excited to hear the story and the lessons they've learned along the way. We'll be dissecting the wins, the losses, and everything in between. So buckle up, grab your headphones, and get ready to dive in the world of digital products. Hey, David, thank you for joining the conversation today. How are you doing?
David Baum (00:42)
Hey, Yash thanks for inviting me. I'm excited to be here.
Yash From Momentum (00:46)
Awesome. Great. Thank you for joining in and let's start with this. So let's start with what is the big bad problem that exists in the world today that you're trying to solve for with Relato.
David Baum (01:00)
excellent. Excellent starting point. So I think everyone understands that content is in everything you do, especially in the, in the GTM team, content is interwoven into every single aspect of all the work we do and all of the channels that businesses, distribute this content to, they are increasingly saturated. The, the dawn of generative AI and mass distribution has meant that all
cold outbound by email is now more or less broken. I get hundreds of emails a week that are mass personalized with AI, but just getting worse and worse. That means that everyone flocks to every other available channel, which means that they are also quite saturated. Search engine optimization, building content for a search crowd is...
Yash From Momentum (01:46)
Yeah.
Yeah.
David Baum (01:51)
undergoing dramatic changes with generative search experience. So just ranking on Google is a completely different game today than it was just for five years ago. And that story continues. But everyone knows that it doesn't mean you stop creating content. It means that you actually create more, but you have to create it better as well. And the surprising insight I've gained is that every single team in modern business, have
mostly a single tool that they do most of their work in that they log into every single day. Sales teams have a CRM. The finance, they have their bookkeeping and accounting platforms, engineers, open VS code, designers, open Figma, so on and so forth. Whereas content marketers who have this incredibly critical role, they have what you call the Frankenstack. And the Frankenstack consists of five to seven general purpose point solutions.
Yash From Momentum (02:24)
Yep.
David Baum (02:48)
that are loosely integrated with some automations with Zapier with a Gmail account bolted on. And this team, they manage all of those applications through a number of tabs. And that is the problem we are solving.
Yash From Momentum (03:04)
So would it be fair to say that essentially, and so tell me a little more from that standpoint. So there are two ways to unify content operations. So one is that you're integrating, which essentially means that you are a layer that sits on top of software stack or platform stack, whatever it is that the content teams are using. Or the second is where you are replicating, which is where you're building it and then
And so then you will have to invest a lot of time and energy into getting to a point where those tool stacks are already today. And then you'll be able to make it significantly better once the investment is made because now everything is natively happening within your platform. So which one of those two are you going forward with?
David Baum (03:53)
Wow. I'll explain how I think about this. I think it's common knowledge today that fundamentally you can build a business in two ways. You can unbundle or you can rebundle. And unbundling has been the name of the game for an incredible number of really good software products in sort of vertical SaaS. But at some point during the last decade where we've been in a market where money has
Yash From Momentum (04:05)
Yeah.
Okay.
David Baum (04:20)
essentially been free. There's been a massive inflow of investments into SaaS, B2B SaaS in particular. Businesses have grown their marketing and go -to -market operations with a lot of people. Every new expert has their own SaaS tool. And we've ended up in a situation where the people call, or analysts call, GTM bloat. And GTM bloat is the situation where SaaS
Yash From Momentum (04:38)
Mm -hmm.
Okay.
All right.
David Baum (04:49)
has way too many people, spends way too much money, and has far too high a cost in acquiring customers. That was fine in a market where everyone was looking for growth at any price, but I think everyone knows that is not the case today. Good investments are few and far between. The rounds are often smaller, and everyone has to do more with less. Investors are looking for profitability, and that means that you can't have a
Yash From Momentum (05:05)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
David Baum (05:18)
128 month payback time on customer acquisition. You have to get back to 12 to 18 months, maybe depending on your account value, but that is the key. every single product that all of these experts in the bloated GTM org, every single product they use is seat based. And since you're part of a broader team, everyone needs a seat. So that means that the cost for all of those tools that you have is actually exceedingly high. And it's part of the problem, but it's quite a big
Yash From Momentum (05:41)
Yep.
David Baum (05:48)
bit of the marketing cost, of course, which is the largest variable cost every business has. So leadership are cutting down on that. We've seen several rounds of layoffs from 2022 and onwards, and cost cutting when it comes to tooling and software as well. What I've noticed now recently is that teams are building back, but not in the way they used to. GCM teams are not adding headcount.
Yash From Momentum (05:53)
Yeah, yeah.
Hmm? Hmm?
Yeah.
Yeah.
David Baum (06:16)
Content marketing teams are not hiring in -house writers and editors. They're growing with freelancers and fractionals. So that is a completely new situation, but it's been enabled by the pandemic, which taught us to work really well remotely. And the recent downturn meant that everyone is getting pretty good at doing more with less. So if you look at that situation in the GTM org, you have a completely new setting.
Yash From Momentum (06:23)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
David Baum (06:46)
where managing all of these tools really isn't the problem anymore. It's actually just doubling down on some really good tools and platforms that work and get the job done. You can't afford to have five to seven different tabs open with 129 bucks per tab per month. That just doesn't work anymore. And if you also take into account that the people who do the real work here, they're consultants, freelancers, and fractionals, and they're looking to run really lean businesses.
Yash From Momentum (07:00)
Yeah.
Yeah.
David Baum (07:14)
They do not want to take part in internal meetings. They're not an integral part of the team. They're contractors, but they do want to understand strategy. They want to be aligned with the business outcomes that their clients are looking for. So what you need is a tool set that meets those needs. And in addition to that, I think every single tool that you use
Yash From Momentum (07:17)
Yeah.
David Baum (07:37)
If you're in, you're in. If your email ends in the same top level domain as the manager and everyone else in the business, then you have access to what you need. But almost no tools are built for this new way of working with fully remote teams where everyone has a private Gmail address and you have to click around for minutes or even hours just to give people the correct access to what they're looking for. So our case is that we are actually collapsing
Yash From Momentum (07:45)
Mm.
Thank
Yeah. Yeehaw.
David Baum (08:05)
Frankenstack into one single platform that is purpose -built for that vertical domain, which is content marketing and working within the GTM team with content, and that is built natively for the problems that they need to solve, which helps align everyone on the team to strategy, regardless of whether they're in -house staff or they work as a freelancer or fractional, that makes everything they need to get the job done immediately available.
Yash From Momentum (08:21)
Thank
Hmm.
David Baum (08:34)
And I've spoken with so many content leaders and marketing leaders. And if you ask them, could you, could you share your latest strategy document on your content strategy or your GTM motion? And they start looking in an email inbox for some attachment from a marketing agency from back in 2019. that, you know, that file is probably called final eight, you know, you know, yeah, that is. Yeah. And what, what, how do do you share that with a team?
Yash From Momentum (08:49)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, final V 1 .8 something like that.
Yeah.
David Baum (09:03)
a team of five people who work in different time zones across the world. Well, that is a real problem. And just firing up a Notion database and putting everything there, I guess could solve some of the problem. If you use a Sun and click up, if you manage your inventory and air table, if you automate some of the tedious repetitive tasks with Zapier, then it gets you about 60 % of the way. But still, it's like asking a sales team how they manage their workflow.
Yash From Momentum (09:25)
Hmm.
David Baum (09:30)
And none of them really know about a CRM, that they don't have that tool. So it's kind of crazy that no one has built this product yet. Now, that is to say, there are some content ops platforms in the world today, but they're sort of old and clunky from a couple of decades ago. And most of them have been built as a sort of a slim workflow add -on on top of digital asset management platforms, are big platforms in old tech.
Yash From Momentum (09:35)
Yeah. Yeah.
-huh.
David Baum (10:00)
But none of them really cut it for B2B SaaS. And most of them have enterprise pricing. So there's no request to demo. There's contact sales, and we'll speak to you. So it's really an unattractive option. we think that there is a massive opportunity, especially if you work with specialized AI models, there's a massive opportunity for vertical SaaS, who goes deep into the domain, understands the workflow, and delivers a solution with crisp.
Yash From Momentum (10:09)
Yeah, yeah.
-huh.
David Baum (10:30)
UX, a delightful user experience, and that is really native to solving the problem that people have today.
Yash From Momentum (10:36)
Got it So that I think this is so true because this is something that happens with us, This is like really instead of having like a PDF in an email, we would have the strategy document created like eight or nine months ago that's in some Google document in some folder which was not correctly named and it was just written at that point of time and then never referred to.
It was not even treated as a live document. It was outcome of a meeting. then that's sort of pretty much it. Half of those things, I don't even think that we implemented. Some of those things we implemented, but we didn't measure. And then so on and so forth. And so this is really absolutely true. And so the next piece that I want to sort of dive into, David, is trying to understand how
like your journey before this, right? And how did you come to this point, right? How did you reach here? And so I think you were running a venture capital fund. Would that be a fair thing to say? Stone Haven Ventures. And so we've seen some people go from being a founder to making the company really massive and making an exit and then become investors. This is...
David Baum (11:46)
Yeah, that's true.
Yash From Momentum (12:02)
How do you shift from analyzing an industry to actually building a product within a particular industry? So I'm sure that as an investor you would mean that. Yeah, please do.
David Baum (12:11)
Yeah, I can tell you a bit about that. So I've been co -founder or partner in new companies for most part of two and half decades. And when you do that long enough, at some point you'll have a few exits. So some of the companies you've co -founded or invested in, get sold and you get a windfall from that. So that was certainly the case for me in 2018 -19. I just sold a recent company that I had co -founded and led.
in 2016, which was a marketplace lending platform, which operated in the Nordics. We sold that to a big bank and that acquisition was also part of a partnership. And we enjoyed working together, the management at the bank and I, and they asked me if I would be interested in heading up a new CVC, so a corporate venture arm for that bank, which I thought was really exciting. It was very, very specific to the vertical of FinTech.
Yash From Momentum (13:02)
.
David Baum (13:08)
in the Nordics, was called Finstart Nordic. And in addition to managing a fund of 300 million NOC, we actually built an accelerator and had a building that was full of the businesses we invested in. There was new businesses we started. So it was quite an ambitious project. Now, I know after more than two decades of working with starting things that my sweet spot, both as a personality and my sort of the academic interest of it, is the journey from zero to one.
Yash From Momentum (13:12)
Okay.
David Baum (13:39)
That is what I like. And for me to take part in it or take responsibility of building up this CBC from a mandate from a board and building it up into an organization, doing the first rounds of investments, building systems and structures so that it works and is a repeatable business, implementing an investment strategy, doing all the tweaks and learning there. That was incredibly valuable for me. I thought it was a wonderful experience. At the same time,
Yash From Momentum (13:39)
Hmm.
Yeah.
David Baum (14:06)
As soon as the business was up and running and stuff started looking like sort of the day -to -day grind of managing a business, my interest wavers. And I was clear to that. I was clear on that with my board. So it actually coincided with the pandemic. I had given notice a fair time before, but it so happened that when I was done with that fund and handed it over to a new leadership, the pandemic hit.
Yash From Momentum (14:26)
-huh.
David Baum (14:35)
And I had some time to both work as an investor, investing some of my own funds in B2B SaaS, young teams, sort of early stage. And I also had time to give some more attention to my family, which I think is fair to say I did a lot of the work before that. And it was certainly my wife's time to have some more opportunity to focus on work. So that was really, that was really
Yash From Momentum (14:39)
Okay.
David Baum (15:05)
part of that journey. But I'd have to admit that my passion is building new businesses. I love product. I love working on strategy. I love speaking with customers or potential customers. I love building an audience. And that is really, really, I think that's also where I do my best work. And the role of investor isn't my favorite role. You know, I'm an optimist. I love helping people and I love seeing the possibilities and opportunities. I'm not the
Yash From Momentum (15:07)
Hmm.
Hmm.
David Baum (15:35)
I'm not naturally someone who's sort of deeply critical and analytic. So doing the work of an investor isn't the easiest role for me. I really have to concentrate hard to be really critical because my knee jerk reaction, if I meet a founding team, a young founding team with a bad pitch, my knee jerk reaction is to actually help them out and improve that, not ask even more critical questions and then say, thank you. it's...
Yash From Momentum (15:39)
Mm.
Hmm.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
David Baum (16:02)
I must say it's much easier for me just to spin up a new company, get started on that, interview customers, understand the problem, develop technology. That is just so second nature to me at this point that I'm really never going back. I still do some angel investing, but it does take a lot of time. And I like to be high conviction, sit on boards, give advice. And it's hard to combine that with running a brand new business.
Yash From Momentum (16:14)
Hmm.
-huh.
Mm -hmm.
Correct. Which is fair. so I think what you're trying to say, and I'm trying to sum up your life's work, so please tell me if I'm summarizing it correctly. I think what you're trying to say is that even at a time when you were leading a venture capital, CVC, corporate venture capital, you were essentially running it as an entrepreneur. So you were taking it from zero to one.
David Baum (16:55)
Absolutely.
Yash From Momentum (16:55)
And then when the time came to take it from 1 to 10 and 10 to 100, which is where the processes have to be scaled, you essentially said, my passion is in taking something else from 0 to 1, and I'd like to start something of my own. So let me ask you some questions that come up in early stages of a SaaS founder. So when you said, OK, hey, you I'm sure
the name could have been different at that point of time. But let's say, relatively something that we're going to build, we want to do content operations, optimize that. I'm going to, so like you're going to speak to prospects and customers and stuff like that. But there needs to be some amount of design, some amount of work on the product side that needs to happen. And so a question is, if you have a million dollars to start it off, like that's the seed capital, do you recruit or do you go to an agency?
David Baum (17:52)
Good question. Yeah. Well, the first thing you need to do is understand customers and you really don't need a team to do that. I'm a strong believer in being capital efficient. I don't think you get more done with a bigger team early on. We're currently four people plus a small bouquet of freelancers. So we're sort of in that sense, a global team, but
Yash From Momentum (17:53)
in place.
Mm
Yeah.
Mm
Mm
David Baum (18:18)
No one on that team is doing any other work than actually the efficient stuff that brings us closer to some signals of PMF. And I've done all of the customer insight work. I've interviewed almost 150 people over the course of nine months. And that is just such an advantage that I can both understand our customers or prospective customers.
Yash From Momentum (18:26)
Hmm.
Mm
David Baum (18:42)
I can dig deeper on subjects. I can translate that into requirements than work with our product team on building the product. Simultaneously, I can use all of those insights and the connections that are created through that work in building an audience. And we've tripled our founder audience on LinkedIn and X during the first eight months of this year. And that has been maybe even more valuable because if I've reached out to someone,
Yash From Momentum (19:05)
Mm
David Baum (19:11)
who could be a prospective customer. I've created a relationship with them. I've had maybe a half an hour or 45 minutes interview. They're bound to be a connection on LinkedIn. So we're following and engaging with each other's content there. They're probably signed up for our early access list. I have sort of someone I can reach out to when we're ready to launch. They're most likely, and we have most likely a couple of shared Slack communities as well. So we can sort of touch.
Yash From Momentum (19:16)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Mm
Mm -hmm.
David Baum (19:39)
We have a touch point there too. And in some instances we meet up at a conference or a seminar on another online event. that's sort of five or six touch points with someone who is smack in the middle of my ICP. And if I sort of outsourced or managed that more in a team setting with some vendors or an agency, then all of that connection would mean that I'd have to have transactions with sharing of information and meetings and learnings and...
Yash From Momentum (19:45)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
David Baum (20:07)
and meeting notes and emails and all of that. So if you manage that chaos well as a single individual, is no more efficient way to start a business. But it does mean that you need a kind of a T -shaped competence profile. So you need to have a breadth, but you need to be able to go into depth. So my first job was as a software engineer. The first business I was involved in, I jumped ship from university and built a...
Yash From Momentum (20:09)
Yeah.
Mm.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah.
David Baum (20:34)
an online bookstore. So I have all of that software engineering knowledge. It's been a couple of decades since anyone would pay me to work as a software engineer, but I've certainly kept my programming skills quite up to date. But I've also worked in marketing, advertising, strategy, and management consulting. So I sort of have that capability too, which of course is an advantage. I understand not everyone has that profile, but...
Yash From Momentum (20:36)
Hmm.
Mm.
David Baum (21:05)
You don't get that kind of a profile if you don't try. the only one who can develop that skill set is yourself. So I think if I was to share something with your audience to younger teams just starting out, it's that you don't need lots of vendors and consultants and other people. What you need to do is actually just read up on how you do the stuff and try and test and learn and get the reps in. And that is how you improve.
Yash From Momentum (21:11)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
David Baum (21:31)
My answer concretely to your question is don't use an agency, don't use the consultants, do the work yourself as much as humanly possible, but make sure that you have someone who can be critical. Reach out to people in your network and instead of just having sort of updates or sharing coffees, have some really concrete questions. I spoke with this, that and the other person, they said this, how should I interpret that? How can I use it? What am I missing? That kind of thing. Be really concrete.
Yash From Momentum (21:37)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Hmm.
Yeah.
David Baum (21:59)
and use the people around you to criticize or critique the work you're doing.
Yash From Momentum (22:03)
And so from an understanding needs and requirements standpoint, we just have a little more.
Let's dive a little deeper into that. One of the challenges that, and I've been an early stage founder, I started a SaaS company called Clientjoy, the CRM for freelancers and agencies. So fairly similar target audience and grew to about 13 ,000 customers, 90 odd countries. Four year journey, got acquired earlier this year and then started Momentum.
David Baum (22:30)
Amazing.
Yash From Momentum (22:37)
And so one of the challenges that I personally also faced, and I'm sure a lot of early stage founders also faces, is that they go in with the assumption and then they look for evidence that these with the hypothesis that they have made. And because I was doing that, there was nobody to tell me that I am doing that. We took directions, we took product directions that we should not have taken. We took pricing decisions that we should not have taken.
We wrote ICP definitions that we should not have. And so how do you get rid of the confirmation bias that a founder typically would have because they do like the idea or the insight that they've come up with. So what is the practice that you have? How do you go about
David Baum (23:20)
That's quite a difficult question to answer. The problem with bias is that they aren't immediately visible to you. So you need feedback loops and you need immediate feedback loops. So I can offer a couple of tactics that I use to get as much feedback as possible on my thinking. bias is a construct that is quite deeply embedded in your thought process. And it's often so well embedded that you aren't
And even though someone points it out, it's not necessarily the case that you sort of, aha, I understand, I've been biased all along. And often if people are explicitly critical to the way you're thinking and pinpoint a bias, it's probably even less likely that you can become aware of it or admit it because you put up your defenses. So, well, I think experience helps.
Yash From Momentum (23:52)
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
David Baum (24:17)
Founding businesses means that you get hit in the face many times a week for years and years on end. And you get hit in the face so many times that you sort of, you may not learn to enjoy it, but you start reflecting on the different ways of getting hit in the face. And that is an efficient way to become quite humble. Now I think people who know me probably wouldn't call me very humble, but I'm always interested in lots of different people's views. And I think just being...
Yash From Momentum (24:17)
Hmm.
Yeah.
David Baum (24:44)
just being interested and a bit nosy and a bit pushy as well, it means that you can get those views, you can sort of surface other views. So a way I've used, for example, a way I've used the fact that I'm building an audience simultaneously with building a product is that when I gain insights through product discovery calls, more of sort of ethnographic research to understand the needs of people and their existing processes where pain points are.
Yash From Momentum (25:06)
Mm -hmm.
David Baum (25:14)
I've used those insights actively to create a comm strategy that I've taken out on LinkedIn as a channel. And the wonderful thing about social media is you get immediate feedback. Also in the case where you don't get any feedback, is feedback too. So no engagement tells you that this isn't interesting, it isn't important. So I've used that feedback both to connect with new people
Yash From Momentum (25:24)
Hmm?
Yep.
That is also feedback for sure. No one cares. Yeah. Yeah.
David Baum (25:43)
So someone who engages with a post that I am not connected with or haven't spoken with, I'll reach out to them and say, as true as that was interesting that you engaged with that, and I'd like to hear more about what you said. And suddenly I've gained more insight by speaking with them. You can bet I'll sign them up to our early access list and we'll be connected there too. And that also means that that feedback, I can feed that directly into product development.
Yash From Momentum (25:56)
you
David Baum (26:10)
And if it's something that challenges our previous assumptions, then it's even more interesting. So our customer insight channel on Slack is one of the most active where I just feed in everything I learn and know from my team. And that is pushed straight into product development. Incidentally, I connect that insight to our content strategy as well. So we've been putting out some high production quality pieces of content on our blog and gained lots of really good feedback.
Yash From Momentum (26:11)
Okay.
Okay.
Hmm.
Hmm.
David Baum (26:40)
For that, I think many people appreciate someone taking time to sort of dig into the details, surface new and maybe unusual voices, augment that and distribute it well on social. But it is a considerable cost for us as a bootstrap business to develop this content. So I test the topic first on LinkedIn and often in the same way that I test ideas and messaging. And if it gains a lot of traction,
Yash From Momentum (26:46)
Yeah.
David Baum (27:08)
And you can be sure I'll prioritize that for a long form high quality production, which we then can distribute and repurpose in many different ways. So that feedback loop or the mechanism of using a quick feedback channel to get feedback on ideas quickly and then using that before you invest in both product and more expensive content, think is certainly worked well for us.
Yash From Momentum (27:13)
Hmm.
Hmm.
Hmm, got it. So, fair point. So which is where you let other people sort of drive your, in a way decision making, I wouldn't say decision making, but their inputs or lack of inputs also plays a role in whether you invest into building something, whether it is a piece of content which is heavy in investment or...
essentially part of a product or a feature or something.
David Baum (28:06)
Yeah, absolutely. know, I people don't really know what they need. They can say what they don't like. They're often pretty good at being sort of unhappy with something invocal about that. But how you shape a product to actually meet that need or solve for the problem, the job to be done, really is a question for product development. And that is a whole different ball game than just complaining on LinkedIn, So you have to interpret that insight. And sometimes you say, great insight, but we're actually not going to do anything about that. That is not a problem we're solving.
Yash From Momentum (28:27)
Yeah.
David Baum (28:35)
Of course you have to inform that process with strategy as well. What is your positioning? So you don't have to build the faster horse. Sometimes you've decided that you want to make a car instead, right?
Yash From Momentum (28:40)
Mm. Mm.
card. Yeah, yeah, which is, which, which that's, that's one of the key questions that I that I ask fairly, fairly often. But, but for today, David, I think this brings us towards the towards the end of the of the conversation. And so, and so towards the end, one of the things that we do is I ask you a question that my previous guest had left for you. And so my previous guest was, was one of the founders of Claap .io. name is Robin.
And so Robin from Claap is, as a founder in France, and building a platform that helps organizations and brands and agencies and freelancers also automate their social media ops from start to finish. And one of the questions that he had was the people who take in, and this relates to your experience before Relato.
A lot of times what might happen is that the tightly knit team that you have today, which is great for taking the company from 0 to 1, but then when the company needs to go from 1 to 10, those may not be the right people.
And so in those circumstances, how do you sort of navigate that? So in your experience with all the other companies that you've run or you invested in, I'm sure that the leadership team at the early stage changed over a period of time when the company started to scale. And so how do you sort of manage that change? How do you tell them that, you you've gotten the company to a million dollars in ARR.
But going from a million to 10, I think we'll have to look for something else. Or these are the skills that you want to develop. So do you internally upskill them and train them? Or do you recruit from the market? What do you do?
David Baum (30:41)
Well, that's an incredibly difficult, well, the honest answer is how do you do that? I think the honest answer is with great difficulty. It's one of the hardest things for a founder to do. I can speak to my experience and my preference, sort of at what stage in a business I like to work, but I've certainly worked on recruiting directors and VP level and build C -suites as well in larger business settings. And it's incredibly difficult. And sometimes some of the worst mistakes founders make.
Yash From Momentum (30:48)
them.
Yeah.
David Baum (31:10)
when they've raised maybe a big seed round or a series A and you really say, okay, we're gonna employ a really good VP of sales that's gonna build a repeatable sales operation scale, is that you hire someone that doesn't resonate with your founder mindset and it's difficult to work together. they're really good at sort of the stuff you do in big businesses, which is sort of walking around thinking and talking. And a lot of the work is done in meetings, thinking and talking.
Yash From Momentum (31:21)
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah
David Baum (31:39)
And most of the grant work is done by agencies, consultants and outsourcing vendors. Right. And I think that that is at least I can answer to what you shouldn't do. Do not hire people who look really experienced on their CV, but only have only have experience in big businesses. Because even though you've scaled it from from zero to one and one to ten, the DNA of the business is still what it was, even though it has transformed. But it's often it often
Yash From Momentum (31:43)
Yeah.
David Baum (32:09)
hasn't transformed as much. I'd say, I primarily try to develop the team I already have. But if you're hiring someone for a more mature role in a larger business where you're looking to scale, hand over from founder led sales, for example, to a professionalized business, look for someone who has that experience, who has been through that journey before. Do not hire someone with an amazing enterprise background.
Yash From Momentum (32:16)
Mm -hmm.
Mm -hmm.
Yeah.
David Baum (32:35)
And also remember, if it's a VP of sales, most really good salespeople, they're primarily good at selling themselves and choosing the right opportunities. So beware.
Yash From Momentum (32:36)
Yeah.
Yeah. While you answered Robin's question, you answered mine as well because we are currently in the market recruiting VP of Sales for Momentum. It's already very difficult to find because we're looking for someone experienced.
But there are a couple of candidates that we were sort of leaning towards, which now qualify the negative sort of filter that you applied. No, but this is great, right? Because this is a conversation that we were internally having as well. So as an organization, are about to go IPO in about six odd months. And we sort of realized that it has been so much founder led.
David Baum (33:11)
Sorry.
Yash From Momentum (33:30)
with four people as founders and sort of a total hundred people team over here. And so it's so much founder led that we've never sort of invested in a middle man. There's no layer in between. It's almost everything flows through us and we're bottlenecks everywhere. And so we are sort of building that team and so identifying each and every function and then bringing in leaders. And I have an interview in a couple of couple of hours where I'll be speaking to that person. But this is interesting. Thank you for that.
for that insight, David. And so next, David, what is your question? What's something that you are wrestling with at Relato that you'd like to ask my next guest?
David Baum (34:09)
great. I love that. I love this format. So my question is, your audience consists primarily of early stage founders and businesses. And one of the most difficult problems is, of course, gaining product market fit. So my question to your next interviewee is, what signals of product market fit do you look for? How do you find them? How do you assess them? And how do you think about
Yash From Momentum (34:27)
Yep.
David Baum (34:37)
the signals of product market fit.
Yash From Momentum (34:39)
I will tell you why this is a great question because I love to see my, this is a question that I have looked for for a while and I have not found a definition that works. So I know for a fact that there no right answer to this but I love to see my guests being asked difficult questions. So this is a great question and thank you David for asking that. One interesting definition that I heard a while back.
was that you know that you hit a PMF when your team does not have time to ask whether we've hit PMF. So when that conversation internally just fizzles out, when it just moves out of the sphere of doubt and you're just trying to fulfill and you're trying to cope up with ops. But I've seen a couple of circumstances where that's not necessarily true, because the economics didn't work out.
you also thought that you had PMF. So it's still an open slash interesting question, which I'll ask my next guest. So that for everyone who's been watching this or listening to this on YouTube or Amazon Music or Spotify, I hope you enjoyed this conversation and you'd be able to find link to Relato in the description over here. Please, if you are a freelancer or an agency or a brand or working in a marketing team, do sign up for that early access.
a program as well. And if you are in a position to share your problems and to share your challenges, do reach out to David on LinkedIn and you can share your challenges managing content operations with him as well. And you never know, it might end up being within the product solving that specific pain point as well. So with that, we come to the end of the episode. Thank you, David, for taking up the time.
David Baum (36:33)
Thank you for having me. It's been great.
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