Pilot

“So pilots, any of the ones we just talked about, They have hired a very large staff that is just using QuickBooks. So they did not start by building their own QuickBooks replacement. They started using QuickBooks, and they started by hiring a lot of people, an…”

“We feel really confident that that will give us all the scale-up data we need. It isn't a, well, we built this pilot because this is what we could kind of get done, and then we kind of have to go build a second one that goes and de-risks these other things. It…”

“We used to do a thing in our monthly updates, back then we did monthly investor updates, where we basically had a referral leaderboard. We're like, thanks to these people for sending, you know, XYZ referrals this month. So we, like, tried to gamify it a little…”

“And now admittedly, like we've 10 X to the ASP, you know, since then, and there's a lot of course that we do now that we didn't previously do, but very clearly we did not pick The correct price point necessarily”

“Around September, 2017. So, you know, nine, 10 months of the company, we had about 60 customers. We were probably already doing about 250 K of ARR. We made our first hire on the sales side”

“And then our second hire wasn't until almost a year after that. It was until August, 2018. We had 240 customers.”

“I think people can get very hung up on, like, having the thing be perfect, whatever the thing is. Like, the product does not need to be perfect. The deck does not need to be perfect. The collateral does not need to be perfect. Like, you just have to get things…”

“The first thing you're going to do is not like get the sale. The first thing you're going to do is like that market discovery and you can do that With nothing but like a little sketch on a napkin or whatever.”

“On day one, we signed up our first three customers because I just called them up and I said, Hey, who's doing your bookkeeping today? Oh, you know, we can actually do it better. You should sign up with pilot. And the way that we provided the services, I just d…”

“I mean, for us, our investors were all people that we had already known. In other words, the lead investor from Index, Mark Goldberg, we worked together at Dropbox.”

“At this stage of the company's life, if I'm doing a specific thing, that's actually a bad sign because it really means that I'm gating the growth of the company in some way. And my only job should be Attracting and retaining the best people, parting ways with …”

“If you debrief on a candidate, and your conclusion is, oh, I don't know, maybe, like, they might be able to do a good job here. Like, that should be a no. Like, you should only bring on board people that you're very, very excited about, because what is your cu…”

“The best interview gives you a signal as to where the candidate spikes. A mediocre interview will let you say no for candidates that are bad, but don't really let you like good candidates really shine.”

“I think the back of the envelope math on this is something like sixty billion dollars a year or I spent every year on SMB bookkeeping and accounting in the US alone.”

“I think it's super important when you go into a pilot, paid or unpaid actually, to identify the success criteria, and if you do that right, You basically can then make a sale upon completion of the pilot.”