Luke Sophinos
speaker
126 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Luke Sophinos’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Like a lot of these are kind of country clubby, you know, sit down, shake hands, build relationships, types, types of businesses. And so if you don't want to do that, go to market needs to be a very key piece of your scorecard. And it needs to be a key piece of your scorecard, especially if you're looking at doing a venture take over the world type of startup, because, um,
VCs almost always like to invest in companies that have product-led or marketing-led customer acquisition because it's just faster, right? If you look at sales-led publicly traded companies, all of their average contract values are massive.
Like the only way to build a really big company, at least based on historical data, like prove me wrong, but the only way to build a really big company if you have a sales-led motion is if you have like pretty substantial ACVs. And ACV being average contract value, right?
So like if you want to grow fast, you want to find industries where you can acquire customers via product-led or marketing-led approaches.
You know, look, I don't know about machine shops. I think that's one of the key things on a scorecard to dig into and figure out. I mean, people listening to your podcast, like smart people, right, creative people, ambitious people, they're gonna do it differently than everybody has done it before. So it doesn't mean to do it how everybody's done it before.
It means to understand how they've done it before And so you can see what works and what hasn't worked. Doesn't mean you can you can add in your own flair and make a few bets that you think can can result in faster growth or, you know, better economics or whatever. And so, yeah, I mean, newsletter creating a machine shop newsletter like I'm sure those guys are on their email. Right. Yeah.
I bet you a lot of those companies aren't doing that well. So it's all industry dependent. Yeah.
And you're like, hey, you're like the dad joke of the day.
Yeah. So that's why Greg makes the big bucks here because he comes up with the creative approaches. I love, I mean, I love it. I'm going to do that for trade schools.
So we've talked, go to market was the next one. I think, um, kind of, and I'm, we're jumping around a little bit, but I think that's okay. So going back real quick to the product piece, I think we talked about opportunities and product. I think it's probably good. Greg talked a little bit about wedge products.
So everybody has a different name for them. I call them wedge products. What a wedge product is, is I define it as it's your get in the door product. So in vertical SaaS, if you found a good opportunity, like the end all be all is to be the one-stop shop, like the all-in-one solution, the source of record, the thing that they use for everything A to Z, right? But nobody starts there.
Nobody ever starts there. And so if you're like, I'm going to build the one-stop shop for machine shops, investors are going to look at you and be like, well, you're out of your mind because it's going to take 10 years and hundreds of millions of dollars and and you're gonna go and they do so many things, you're gonna go an inch deep and you're not gonna do any of them well, right?
So the typical approach and like the approach I use at my business was you find an area where it's on paper, there's like really shitty competition, but it's really important to the customer. And it's being done very poorly today. And you're able to come up with something creative that is something that is easy to get in the door with. They can implement it and deploy it quickly.
It's not a 12-month implementation. And it's your reputation prover. Nine out of 10 folks fail on their wedge product. And in my view, it's because they don't really think about it. So, Let me give you an example of like a beautiful case study on wedge products. And I write about these in my vertical SaaS newsletter.
But a beautiful case study on this is a company called roofer.com, R-O-O-F-R.com. They're building software for roofing companies. Well, roofing companies are this beautifully massive market, huge mix of SMBs, mid-market enterprise, really bought like long tail, a lot of small businesses. So beautiful thing. It would have checked all of our boxes we came up with, Greg.
What Roofer did is they didn't say, hey, we're gonna build all in one software for roofing and they went to market with that. They said, we're gonna build a proposal tool Right. That enables proposals are really important. Like you go on Google and you you want to get a proposal.
Like, well, what was happening is you call some number and some like random guy shows up at your house and is like, hey, I'm here to give you the proposal on your roof. And it's all awkward. And he's got his clipboard and he tells you, OK, it's going to be a thousand dollars after he like climbs up on your roof.
So what these guys did is they created a proposal tool that literally just use Google Maps to like look at the roof. And it wasn't perfect. Right. And but it enabled the roofing company to on the back end say, hey, here's my pricing. Like, here's what it should be. This is what it should look like. And then customer was able to get a real time quote.
They could, you know, obviously with a star that says like subject to change when we get out there physically, but should be in the realm, they're able to book it. Well, when they book it, roofer.com got paid. So it was a free wedge product. Right. So they were able to they were like the first company I've ever heard of that acquired roofing companies via marketing.
Like they did Instagram ads and Facebook ads and blah, blah, blah. And they were able to acquire them via digital, which is like unheard of in home services industries. Like it's always heavy sales led, like inside sales, calling, calling, calling. They got in with that product. It's spread like wildfire among roofing companies because it's like this free tool.
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