Collin Stewart

I'm like, cool.

I did customer validation.

I showed them the thing.

They went, yeah, validated.

And I did that a lot.

And I realized that that's not how you do customer validation or customer development.

That's how you do look at my idea.

Isn't it cool?

Thanks.

And how you get interview 150 people and zero of them buy from you.

And so the realization was I needed to ask them questions and not share what I was working on first.

And because the crazy part is, another piece of why I kept going is I knew I was right.

Fundamentally, the core insight I had was the transition from CRM being something you installed on your laptop to something that you accessed in the cloud.

And keep in mind, this is 2012 when we were talking, the timeline we're talking about.

So CRM is Salesforce.

or Cloud CRM of Salesforce, and you're accessing it through Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 or Google Chrome, which is like Chrome was good at the time, but most people in the enterprise were using IE7 or whatever it was, Internet Explorer 6, 7, 8.

And it was 28 clicks to create an account, create a contact, and send them an email in Salesforce.

And so CRM went from being this thing that I installed on my laptop, and it was my personal productivity tool.

It was my Rolodex.

It was like my daily planner, my agenda, like my pen and paper.