Matt Wensing
VP of Product & Design, Customer.io. On 1 show, 5 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutivehostoperator@mattwensing ↗LinkedIn ↗mattwensing.com ↗
Matt Wensing previously co-founded Riskpulse and founded Summit, a modeling and automation platform backed by TinySeed and venture capital. He currently leads product, design, and AI workflow initiatives as VP of Product & Design at Customer.io.
1shows
5appearances
32statements
1resolved
1supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
15said about them ↓ Everything Matt Wensing said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Wensing: Founders Should Ignore Early Customers Who Won't Scale With Them
“There are actually times to not listen to your current customers. And I say current under underlying current, because those customers are not the ones that are going to get you to your dreams or where you're trying to go. Forget dreams, the next milestone. It'…”
Wensing: Lead Scoring Cannot Support Standalone Venture-Backed Companies
“So it is a category. It's not just a feature, but it's pretty small in terms of it is not a venture scale category. So if somebody came to you and said, hey, I want to build an entire company or lead scoring and I want to raise five million bucks. That doesn't…”
Wensing: Downsizing an Early-Stage Startup From 15 People Is Almost Impossible
“You hire enough people, you've basically created this complex system of scaling that back is super hard. Like imagine you have 10 or 15 people and you're like, I don't even know if we can reduce this to two or three people at this point, because I don't know h…”
Wensing: Winning an existing software category beats inventing a new one
“Better to be like the really amazing player in that calculator space than to invent a new thing, which everybody then has to invest so much mental energy in placing it in their brain.”
First-Time Founder Reputation Eclipses Product Output Early On
“As a first-time founder, I think a really hard lesson to learn was everything I was doing was secondary to, you know, who I was, and whether they knew me, and there's no shortcuts to building up that reputation, right?”
Non-Technical Founders Should Master Product Management Before Seeking a CTO
“When you're talking about not having a technical co-founder, what I'm actually implying is in this scenario, I wouldn't advise going out and finding a CTO or technical co-founder. And I don't think Tyler is saying that's what they want to do, but what you're d…”
Wensing: Broad Positioning Fails for Self-Serve SaaS Motions
“What we found was just this broad, broadly appealing, broadly positioned, and broadly expressed platform. It was perfect for those sales, again, and those conversations. But it, when you come to a website and it says that if you go through self-service, it's n…”
Wensing: Choosing an Established Category Fixed Summit's Self-Serve Onboarding
“By choosing an existing product category, which is lead scoring now, we solved a bunch of problems that really I think would have wrecked the ship if we had opened up self-service without doing that.”
Wensing: Lead Scoring Is the Baltic Avenue of the SaaS Board
“Existing category, it's kind of sleepy. Meaning it's, I like to say it's the Baltic Avenue of the Monopoly board. It's not the boardwalk or the park place where there's just like, obviously it's super fancy and everybody's in on it. It's super competitive.”
Wensing: The 2024 VC Challenge Is Balancing Vision With Rapid Revenue
“I think the real challenge even the venture folks have now is, how do I have a gigantic vision, but then ship something quickly that gets to revenue quickly?”
Wensing: Summit Explored Its Market for Years by Never Exceeding Four Workers
“We stayed small. I mean, the most we've ever had is you know, four people, which was contractors and a couple employees working on it, and that has allowed us to explore this market opportunity for years.”
Wensing: 90% of users fail to grasp low-code modeling tools
“I would say as high as maybe 90 out of a hundred people, They kind of take the two Lego parts. They kind of try to bonk them together. They don't click. It's just not working for them. And, you know, that's the same way as people trying any kind of design tool…”
Wensing: Finalize product positioning before initiating a website redesign
“And I would honestly say, if you can wait to do your new site until after you figure out your new positioning, do it, because mixing those two together, This is actually kind of the second or third version of a fully designed site that we kind of went through,…”
Wensing: Summit's future revenue will rely on marketplace over SaaS subscriptions
“Yeah, I see the majority of it coming from the marketplace and the embedding and the sharing.”
Wensing: Founders have a bias toward confirming, complimentary feedback
“I think we're always looking as founders for validation... And so when people say things that are complimentary, they just tend to really, I wanted to say weigh on us, but that sounds bad, but they really put wind in our sails, you know, pick your metaphor. Li…”
Wensing: Competing with spreadsheets is difficult because they are endlessly flexible
“The difficult thing about competing against a spreadsheet, and probably other products like that, is that a spreadsheet is just endlessly flexible. Right? There's nothing you can't do in a spreadsheet.”
Wensing: Summit V1 would have sold subscriptions but attracted the wrong persona
“Who knows what the old version, I'm pretty sure I would have sold some subscriptions as well. But again, back to the personas, it wouldn't have been to these people. Right. It would have been to those other people, and that was not what I ultimately wanted to …”
Wensing: Summit's rewrite alienated early users who preferred the simpler original
“There's a group of users of the first product that I essentially alienated, right? They came to the new one and basically said, what have you done? You know, like you took away the one I liked and you replaced it with this power tool that she's, I don't know w…”
Wensing: Founders struggle with spreadsheets but easily model their business descriptively
“What's nice about a model approach instead of a spreadsheet is, you set a founder in front of a spreadsheet and you say, put your business in here. And there's kind of an immediate thought of, okay, I need a revenue row, I guess, and I also need a, Expenses ro…”
Bootstrapped Startups Must Bow to Enterprise Procurement Habits
“You need to support enterprise clients buying process, like how they buy is how they buy. You're not going to change that, especially as a independent bootstrap startup, unless you're changing an industry, right? You're probably not going to change how they bu…”
Advisor Equity Must Vest Over Two Years Rather Than Upfront
“Like you never give that percentage upfront. They earn that over, you know, a two year period.”
Wensing: Scaling what works is a fundamentally different job than early-stage creation
“Once a company gets to a growth phase where it's about doing the things that are working more and more, and less about creating new things that add risk and, you know, add new variables to the equation, I wasn't getting to use that superpower as much as I even…”
Wensing: I will never raise from dozens of small angel investors again
“I didn't regret raising money for sure. That many though, yes, like that's not something I'm going to do again.”
Wensing: Good investors want defensible, rigorous projections over hockey sticks
“Good investors don't want
Unrealistic or silly projections either. You know, I know that everybody thinks we want that slide that has everything up and to the right, but a good investor, especially one that's thinking about sustainable, profitable businesses, …”
The other half of the tape: Matt Wensing's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 15 times in 5 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Rob Walling 13Ruben Gamez 1Derrick Reimer 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Startups For the Rest of Us 15
2024 3 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
2021 6 mentions in 1 episode
2020 6 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Matt's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| STARTUPS FOR THE REST OF USLEDGER | VP of Product & Design, Customer.io | 5 | 32 | 100% 1/1 | full record on Startups For the Rest of Us → |