May 22, 2025 • 36 mins
Founders overvalue revenue in the early days. The first 10 customers are about learning. Nothing you build next will matter if you don’t have a tight feedback loop.
That’s how Jason Moolenaar approached the launch of Sentient. A tool that fixes one of the most expensive blind spots in B2B sales: the time lag between form fills and follow-ups.
He knew the problem firsthand, but he didn’t rush to scale. He optimized for speed, feedback, and reality checks. Most founders don’t.
Highlights include: Validating Within your Network (03:53), Predictable Channels for Early Growth (14:21), Niching Down (19:05), The Sweet PMF Feeling (23:35), And more…
Stay updated with our podcast and the latest insights in Outbound Sales and Go-to-Market Strategies!
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Collin Stewart (00:00):
All right. Just gonna do a time check here. Let me hide all my things. Hide that. Hide that. I have the attention span of a goldfish, so I have to make sure that there's nothing on the screen.
(00:01):
Welcome to Sales Leaders Teach. What's Working for.
Very quickly. And so even with an SDR team, even with, all the people and we were huge operations or 24 kind of five operations, so there would be a lag there. And when I say a lag, I would say 30 minutes to maybe eight hours. And it became a reoccurring problem. And I just said, I'm just gonna solve that problem for myself and put my money where my mouth is and build this solution that just basically responds in five seconds or less to any contact form completion via.
And I had a fair bit of knowledge about it, not only from the, just the side of the sales world and the structure of sales and where the kind of gaps were and how. Kinda like that marketing team works with the sales team, right? Because marketing is the one who's, super excited when a lead comes in and a contact form is completed and sales is too.
Right on. And then how did you, so when you put it all together, how did you find the, your first customers? What was the next step once you made the decision? What came next?
So that's kinda how I started. And then when I got. 20 of those up and running. I had a lot of feedback in terms of just where the challenges were what I needed to do in terms of implementation and training. I thought given how easy the solution is to use that, people would just do it themselves.
I really like that you started small. I think to your point, when you're trying to nail your first couple of customers, an 18 month enterprise sales cycle is gonna murder you. It's not something that's possible. As the somebody who's been the first sales guy for a number of startups, including three of my own, it's really nice to be able to get some velocity going.
And they have to get through security. If you're at a regulated industry or you're at some big organization, you have to get through all their security protocols or cyber stuff. Their team's gonna vet the company and make sure that they're going to, have the resources to continue as an operation before they're gonna move forward.
every investor says, go sell more. Sell. And I do think it is one of the, maybe not myths, but maybe the. Worst understood advice in tech, go sell more. It is both true and false. Yeah. 'cause I think what you were saying is the revenue isn't as important as what you learn from that revenue.
'cause once you tackle a big enterprise customer, you gotta have your ducks in a row to be able to be successful. Otherwise, you are putting out fires every single day. You are, your organization is running around people with their hair on fire every day. Yeah. So you gotta move. Be careful with that.
Jason Moolenaar (00:10):
Yeah, I had a couple, free users and really what the initial strategy was to go down the credit based model, so usage based.
One to three months. And just initially, and just say, you're not gonna count that as a RR but you're gonna just at least have some revenue. You're gonna have somebody who has their skin in the game, or they're paying you a thousand bucks or, 500 bucks or whatever, and you get a lot of, you get far more value out of them than the 500 bucks is.
Collin Stewart (00:12):
Totally. But you've had the opportunity to learn while it's. Discounted. I hate saying the word as a salesperson,
Jason Moolenaar (00:13):
Fair bit. I'd probably say. Two thirds to 75% of them became customers and, or referred me to other groups. And I've started to partner with some of those guys too, who have maybe like tangential solutions or in other incubators or things like that with their startups.
Collin Stewart (00:14):
Love it. I think the biggest signal, the biggest positive signal I like to see is people keep using the software and then they refer a friend.
It's hard for a VP of marketing or someone to say, yes, I wanna spend money on a solution that qualifies a inbound, leads when we're not getting any at this time, so pivoted out. And I tried to, I really started to talk to a lot of people, just people that I knew on my network.
And then people were, pretty responsive in, in these certain industries. And I started to just sit niche down and pinpoint into one and just said, I'm just gonna go for a couple months after this industry and try to have as many conversations as I had as I could. And it worked out and I started to close at a more predictable kind of rate.
I wouldn't quit. I would start to try to figure out where are some other avenues that I can go just to elicit feedback from people who have expertise in other industries that you may not have been in before. And then start that process, have some conversations, and then once you hear some kind of similar ideas coming through from different people who aren't.
And so the moment was the. Finding a particular vertical and then hearing consistency and the problems and pains that you were able to solve from a very similar ideal customer profile. Am I on the right track there?
And sometimes you concur to. Okay. Think about the sub subcategories of it, right? Like where the specific pain is recurring in a specific person's. Kind of what they're specifically doing in that industry is now I can even niche down more and go back after that area where I know there's a lot of pain versus maybe there's certain other aspects of that industry where someone's doing something slightly different.
Jason Moolenaar (00:20):
Yeah. No, and I think that's an interesting topic, right? And it's definitely yeah, you want to sell. As much as possible to as many people as possible. But I think that's unrealistic a lot of times until you've really tackled again is your product ready for prime time? Is your product ready to be everything to everybody?
Everybody knows you. Yeah. Everybody knows you. And then it's okay to pivot out of that, or not pivot out but to expand out on that and go someplace else and do the same thing and just repeat that around all these industries that you feel like you can tackle, but you can't, in my opinion, you can't be everything to everybody unless you have just a product that solves the problem that so many people have.
I don't know if they would exactly describe it that in that way, but I don't know if they're necessarily targeting, maybe cursors may be targeting engineers more broadly, but I suspect they have some, like very specific stacks they're they're very good at and like they're probably not targeting folks that are doing like deep backend, system level work.
That is. Very basic, but I all of a sudden seem very smart and feel very smart. But it's not gonna help the top tier engineer really get much better at coding. It might help them expedite some little nuanced things. But that's a valuable place to be. Making people that aren't great in something really good at it.
When you get to that point in your conversation where you're like, you get the basics of what's going on in, in their world, what are some of the challenges, and then you maybe pitch the solution right a little bit in that conversation, say this is what I have.
Collin Stewart (00:25):
I love it. I think it was Mark Roberts's idea, but he talked about product Market fit is finding the gap in the market and being able to solve the gap and then go to market fit is being able to define precisely who experiences the gap the greatest, and then what they need in order to solve it.
ICP of this, that really is gonna be the one that, that solves that, that needs this solution. And it's structure of the organization, the technology they use in place, like what kind of, what industry or industries are they in, right? Like how fragmented is this industry? How many tech players are in this?
Ions and, graphics and things like that you could ever imagine. But I grew up in the PC world, and then there's the folks that kind of missed that. They didn't have access to PCs or, anything until they were probably late in high school or in college. So there's, you gotta figure that stuff out too.
The questions we would ask the conversation we have it's very hard to niche down, get very specific, get to that age cohort or specific age, get to that technological sophistication level that you want. What's their tech stack, what's the region they're in? That plays a huge part in what I'm doing because there's just, I see it certain regions of the country, people are much more receptive than others.
Jason Moolenaar (00:29):
No, definitely. So it's been fun, it's been interesting and I think, it's a nice problem to have now, right? To try to get to that next level. But it takes a lot of work and it's just a pivot away from what you were talking about right now. It's like the go to market versus, all the other stuff.
It depends, what are the other, is it conferences? Is it combination of all these events? Is it just doing webinars and education? 'cause AI still is somewhat new to a lot of people, right? Everyone's like ai, ai, but there's, everyone kind of knows Chatt, bt now we know about kind of these LLMs that do stuff for us.
I guess I use the term hoodwink again, right? Like I don't spend a ton of money on a bunch of stuff that doesn't add any value, and now I'm in a worse place than I was before. So educating people on, I try to educate people on like I'm a small piece in the puzzle. I'm a low cost. Kind of solution that I don't, I'm not here to break your bank, but if you use this in conjunction with a couple other different strategies, you can be really successful and we can help you with those other strategies or you can do it on your own, whatever you want to do. So there's still a bit of education, so I guess that's a long answer to what's the next step? But it's it's tough, right? It's like a big, it's a big game that you gotta figure out.
Yeah. And that's a great point, right? Because we all think, come in the B2B tech world, like everyone's on LinkedIn all day long, right? It's be, it's becoming almost too much at this point, but there are people who are like, yeah, I have a LinkedIn account.
Collin Stewart (00:33):
A hundred percent. Yeah, I could double click on that and go forever. So I, I won't, but I strongly agree. Trying to figure out what channel people are responsive to I is one of the most important things.
Says you want open a chat now, do you wanna receive a text message or phone call now? And you have the option of which communication channel you want. And from there we will communicate, we'll contact you within five seconds or less. In that communication, we will, ask you information gathering questions about what your problem is or what you're trying to solve for something like that.
And so what I've learned over the years is that is when the problem is top of mind. That's when you want to ask them all the questions. That's when they're willing to answer, truthfully about what's going on. And if you wait an hour. They may be at a company where Hey, a whole fire drill is now happening.
Let's make sure that you're you're getting best bang for your buck. In that process. So that's what I do. You can find me at our website is sentient st. So sentient sam tom.com. Check out the website and if contact me via the website. Just click the contact button.
All right. Just gonna do a time check here. Let me hide all my things. Hide that. Hide that. I have the attention span of a goldfish, so I have to make sure that there's nothing on the screen.
(00:01):
Welcome to Sales Leaders Teach. What's Working for.
Very quickly. And so even with an SDR team, even with, all the people and we were huge operations or 24 kind of five operations, so there would be a lag there. And when I say a lag, I would say 30 minutes to maybe eight hours. And it became a reoccurring problem. And I just said, I'm just gonna solve that problem for myself and put my money where my mouth is and build this solution that just basically responds in five seconds or less to any contact form completion via.
And I had a fair bit of knowledge about it, not only from the, just the side of the sales world and the structure of sales and where the kind of gaps were and how. Kinda like that marketing team works with the sales team, right? Because marketing is the one who's, super excited when a lead comes in and a contact form is completed and sales is too.
Right on. And then how did you, so when you put it all together, how did you find the, your first customers? What was the next step once you made the decision? What came next?
So that's kinda how I started. And then when I got. 20 of those up and running. I had a lot of feedback in terms of just where the challenges were what I needed to do in terms of implementation and training. I thought given how easy the solution is to use that, people would just do it themselves.
I really like that you started small. I think to your point, when you're trying to nail your first couple of customers, an 18 month enterprise sales cycle is gonna murder you. It's not something that's possible. As the somebody who's been the first sales guy for a number of startups, including three of my own, it's really nice to be able to get some velocity going.
And they have to get through security. If you're at a regulated industry or you're at some big organization, you have to get through all their security protocols or cyber stuff. Their team's gonna vet the company and make sure that they're going to, have the resources to continue as an operation before they're gonna move forward.
every investor says, go sell more. Sell. And I do think it is one of the, maybe not myths, but maybe the. Worst understood advice in tech, go sell more. It is both true and false. Yeah. 'cause I think what you were saying is the revenue isn't as important as what you learn from that revenue.
'cause once you tackle a big enterprise customer, you gotta have your ducks in a row to be able to be successful. Otherwise, you are putting out fires every single day. You are, your organization is running around people with their hair on fire every day. Yeah. So you gotta move. Be careful with that.
Jason Moolenaar (00:10):
Yeah, I had a couple, free users and really what the initial strategy was to go down the credit based model, so usage based.
One to three months. And just initially, and just say, you're not gonna count that as a RR but you're gonna just at least have some revenue. You're gonna have somebody who has their skin in the game, or they're paying you a thousand bucks or, 500 bucks or whatever, and you get a lot of, you get far more value out of them than the 500 bucks is.
Collin Stewart (00:12):
Totally. But you've had the opportunity to learn while it's. Discounted. I hate saying the word as a salesperson,
Jason Moolenaar (00:13):
Fair bit. I'd probably say. Two thirds to 75% of them became customers and, or referred me to other groups. And I've started to partner with some of those guys too, who have maybe like tangential solutions or in other incubators or things like that with their startups.
Collin Stewart (00:14):
Love it. I think the biggest signal, the biggest positive signal I like to see is people keep using the software and then they refer a friend.
It's hard for a VP of marketing or someone to say, yes, I wanna spend money on a solution that qualifies a inbound, leads when we're not getting any at this time, so pivoted out. And I tried to, I really started to talk to a lot of people, just people that I knew on my network.
And then people were, pretty responsive in, in these certain industries. And I started to just sit niche down and pinpoint into one and just said, I'm just gonna go for a couple months after this industry and try to have as many conversations as I had as I could. And it worked out and I started to close at a more predictable kind of rate.
I wouldn't quit. I would start to try to figure out where are some other avenues that I can go just to elicit feedback from people who have expertise in other industries that you may not have been in before. And then start that process, have some conversations, and then once you hear some kind of similar ideas coming through from different people who aren't.
And so the moment was the. Finding a particular vertical and then hearing consistency and the problems and pains that you were able to solve from a very similar ideal customer profile. Am I on the right track there?
And sometimes you concur to. Okay. Think about the sub subcategories of it, right? Like where the specific pain is recurring in a specific person's. Kind of what they're specifically doing in that industry is now I can even niche down more and go back after that area where I know there's a lot of pain versus maybe there's certain other aspects of that industry where someone's doing something slightly different.
Jason Moolenaar (00:20):
Yeah. No, and I think that's an interesting topic, right? And it's definitely yeah, you want to sell. As much as possible to as many people as possible. But I think that's unrealistic a lot of times until you've really tackled again is your product ready for prime time? Is your product ready to be everything to everybody?
Everybody knows you. Yeah. Everybody knows you. And then it's okay to pivot out of that, or not pivot out but to expand out on that and go someplace else and do the same thing and just repeat that around all these industries that you feel like you can tackle, but you can't, in my opinion, you can't be everything to everybody unless you have just a product that solves the problem that so many people have.
I don't know if they would exactly describe it that in that way, but I don't know if they're necessarily targeting, maybe cursors may be targeting engineers more broadly, but I suspect they have some, like very specific stacks they're they're very good at and like they're probably not targeting folks that are doing like deep backend, system level work.
That is. Very basic, but I all of a sudden seem very smart and feel very smart. But it's not gonna help the top tier engineer really get much better at coding. It might help them expedite some little nuanced things. But that's a valuable place to be. Making people that aren't great in something really good at it.
When you get to that point in your conversation where you're like, you get the basics of what's going on in, in their world, what are some of the challenges, and then you maybe pitch the solution right a little bit in that conversation, say this is what I have.
Collin Stewart (00:25):
I love it. I think it was Mark Roberts's idea, but he talked about product Market fit is finding the gap in the market and being able to solve the gap and then go to market fit is being able to define precisely who experiences the gap the greatest, and then what they need in order to solve it.
ICP of this, that really is gonna be the one that, that solves that, that needs this solution. And it's structure of the organization, the technology they use in place, like what kind of, what industry or industries are they in, right? Like how fragmented is this industry? How many tech players are in this?
Ions and, graphics and things like that you could ever imagine. But I grew up in the PC world, and then there's the folks that kind of missed that. They didn't have access to PCs or, anything until they were probably late in high school or in college. So there's, you gotta figure that stuff out too.
The questions we would ask the conversation we have it's very hard to niche down, get very specific, get to that age cohort or specific age, get to that technological sophistication level that you want. What's their tech stack, what's the region they're in? That plays a huge part in what I'm doing because there's just, I see it certain regions of the country, people are much more receptive than others.
Jason Moolenaar (00:29):
No, definitely. So it's been fun, it's been interesting and I think, it's a nice problem to have now, right? To try to get to that next level. But it takes a lot of work and it's just a pivot away from what you were talking about right now. It's like the go to market versus, all the other stuff.
It depends, what are the other, is it conferences? Is it combination of all these events? Is it just doing webinars and education? 'cause AI still is somewhat new to a lot of people, right? Everyone's like ai, ai, but there's, everyone kind of knows Chatt, bt now we know about kind of these LLMs that do stuff for us.
I guess I use the term hoodwink again, right? Like I don't spend a ton of money on a bunch of stuff that doesn't add any value, and now I'm in a worse place than I was before. So educating people on, I try to educate people on like I'm a small piece in the puzzle. I'm a low cost. Kind of solution that I don't, I'm not here to break your bank, but if you use this in conjunction with a couple other different strategies, you can be really successful and we can help you with those other strategies or you can do it on your own, whatever you want to do. So there's still a bit of education, so I guess that's a long answer to what's the next step? But it's it's tough, right? It's like a big, it's a big game that you gotta figure out.
Yeah. And that's a great point, right? Because we all think, come in the B2B tech world, like everyone's on LinkedIn all day long, right? It's be, it's becoming almost too much at this point, but there are people who are like, yeah, I have a LinkedIn account.
Collin Stewart (00:33):
A hundred percent. Yeah, I could double click on that and go forever. So I, I won't, but I strongly agree. Trying to figure out what channel people are responsive to I is one of the most important things.
Says you want open a chat now, do you wanna receive a text message or phone call now? And you have the option of which communication channel you want. And from there we will communicate, we'll contact you within five seconds or less. In that communication, we will, ask you information gathering questions about what your problem is or what you're trying to solve for something like that.
And so what I've learned over the years is that is when the problem is top of mind. That's when you want to ask them all the questions. That's when they're willing to answer, truthfully about what's going on. And if you wait an hour. They may be at a company where Hey, a whole fire drill is now happening.
Let's make sure that you're you're getting best bang for your buck. In that process. So that's what I do. You can find me at our website is sentient st. So sentient sam tom.com. Check out the website and if contact me via the website. Just click the contact button.
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