Didi Gurfinkel, co-founder and CEO of Data Rails, recounts the investor skepticism and lack of traction metrics during the company's early pre-PMF years.
Insight
Gurfinkel: Founders should remove all sales friction during pivots to test PMF
“Moving these barriers was, I think, a very smart decision, and retrospectively, I would do it even before. That every pivot that I'm doing, everything in order to find and to optimize the time To find the mistakes, and to realize that you are in the wrong dire…”
Insight
Gurfinkel: CFOs with 15 years in Excel won't adopt web-based FP&A
“You are a CFO of a 200 employees company. You use Excel for 15 years to run your finance. You will never leave Excel. So all these web-based FP&A solution, FP&A web-based financial system, you will never Even think to move from Excel to the web.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Gurfinkel: Datarails beat competitors in every deal due to connectivity
“And when we came with such a compelling and impressive technology with this capability that we beat them in every deal. In every deal, we beat them because they couldn't even get close to what we offer with this connectivity with Excel and database.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Gurfinkel: 100% outbound sales scaled Datarails from $0 to $20M ARR
“And this outbound motion took us from zero to a million in the first year, second year from million to five, and the third, we got to almost twenty million in outbound. At some point in the third year, we started to develop also the inbound, but the outbound, …”
Insight
Gurfinkel: CIOs want to replace Excel, but finance teams insist on it
“If you speak with the CIO of the company, you speak with the business, the typically business user, they use Excel, but their dream is to get rid of Excel, right?... Finance people want to stay with Excel because it's more just a tool. This is part of their, e…”
What-if
Gurfinkel: DataRails would not have built deep spreadsheet tech without early failures
“I think that the depth of the technology, the platform that we developed, We would never invested so much in a robust platform that connects a spreadsheet to database. And you can look at our competitor that they have some Excel integration, this and that, but…”