Disclosure certainty 4/5 debate potential 1/5

Camara: Athennian used customer discovery workflow charts as its year-one sales pitch

Adrian Camara · Adrian Camara, Founder of Athennian | How to do Customer Discovery · PMF Show · Jan 16, 2023 · at 11:37

Adrian Camara, founder of Athennian, explains how he built sales credibility with large law firms and enterprise buyers as an early-stage startup without an office.

0:00 / 0:37exact quote · 37.2s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Showing those early customers, the work we put in, like that was my sales pitch. I literally brought up those Visio charts was just like, you know, like kind of like a mirror board type of thing. And like, that was my sales pitch for the first year is I sat down with prospects in a boardroom and this is obviously pre-COVID you're just pounding pavement. And I put that up on a mirror board. Or Vizio at the time, you know, and I said, and I, you know, and I pitched to them, I understand this problem. This is the work I've put in. And that immediately establishes credibility with these users and with these buyers that you understand what you're talking about.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Adrian Camara

Insight
Camara: Founders should not write code without six-figure deposit commitments
“My threshold, if I ever do this again, would be I would not start cutting a line of code unless I can get, you know, six figure order form deposits on the basis of a PowerPoint deck. If I'm unable to do that, I either have not identified a painful enough of a …”
Adrian Camara Jan 16, 2023 ▶ 18:41 Adrian Camara, Founder of Athennian | How to do Customer Discovery · PMF Show
Opinion
Camara: Canada lacks a strong mid-market compared to the US
“Canada doesn't have a very big mid market, but the United States does. And I, you know, and I think that's one thing that, that, that does create some inefficiency in Canadian founders is in their home market. There's not a great mid market.”
Adrian Camara Jan 16, 2023 ▶ 24:12 Adrian Camara, Founder of Athennian | How to do Customer Discovery · PMF Show
Insight
Camara: Founders should extract the wisdom embedded in legacy software
“There's a lot of wisdom built in legacy systems. People dismiss them as old and clunky at the time they weren't. And at the time someone went through a product process. Over years and years and years to build something. And there's tons of wisdom in those lega…”
Adrian Camara Jan 16, 2023 ▶ 10:03 Adrian Camara, Founder of Athennian | How to do Customer Discovery · PMF Show
Insight
Camara: Competitors struggle by designing for lawyers instead of paralegals
“We have some competitors today and had a very similar origin story to me where corporate lawyers observed the problem. They missed that step of like, okay, we got to sit down and spend six months with the primary users of this product. And tear down their day …”
Adrian Camara Jan 16, 2023 ▶ 10:51 Adrian Camara, Founder of Athennian | How to do Customer Discovery · PMF Show
Insight
Camara: Delivery-contingent enterprise contracts create massive startup risk
“Our first, like our first iteration of our first customers, they were contracts with deposits, but the balance was due on delivery of the product, which is when you're selling into, you know, mid market enterprise, that's super high risk because the definition…”
Adrian Camara Jan 16, 2023 ▶ 13:11 Adrian Camara, Founder of Athennian | How to do Customer Discovery · PMF Show
Insight
Camara: Enterprise co-development requires champions willing to take career risk
“The one thing that I realized is like, if you want to do this co-development process with mid-market or enterprise, you have to find people in those organizations that are willing to take a lot of risk.”
Adrian Camara Jan 16, 2023 ▶ 14:59 Adrian Camara, Founder of Athennian | How to do Customer Discovery · PMF Show
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 250 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.