The POWER of Customer Conversations 🗣️ ft. Anis Bennecaur

Yeah, so think of starting your first startup as buying your first car, right? You're going to bump it everywhere. You're going to crash it a few times—not too hard, but still—you're going to learn a lot.

Welcome back to another episode of the Revenue Reimagine podcast. We are so lucky to have with us today one of my friends, arguably the co-founder and CEO of what I think is the best conversational intelligence platform out there. But we have Anish Benaur with us, who is the co-founder and CEO of Attention. He was also formerly the co-founder and CEO of Mixer, where he had an exit and did a good amount of growth for a small company. Some of you might have heard of called Tinder. That is not where Dale and I met. But Anish, welcome to the show, man.

Thank you. Excited to be here. We're glad to have you. I mean, we got to put up with Dale, but we're glad to have you here.

It is true. It is true. How's everything going, Anish? Appreciate you joining us.

Good, good. Thank you. I'm in Miami right now, based in New York, but in Miami at a customer office for the day.

You should go visit Adam.

I know, I know. We already talked about this, Dale, because you were late.

Good. Yeah, awesome. So one of the things we love to talk about with founders is the origin story of Attention. Like, why did you start it? What was the genesis of it? Tell us a bit about the origin story.

Yeah, absolutely. So before Attention, I founded another startup called Mixer—it was a professional network for creatives, like LinkedIn for people in the creative space. And at one point, we were scaling all of our sales. We hired a head of sales over at Mixer. She was using LinkedIn job postings, but for our own platform, to companies like Capital One, Square, Havas Media, and so on. And when we were selling to all these customers, especially when the pandemic hit, we all started selling via Zoom. It was impossible to understand what was happening within our deals. Our CRM was always empty. There were so many challenges that we dealt with as a startup. We started to look into how we could fix those problems. And by trying to stitch things together at the time, we realized that this could be a product.

At the same time, I met with my biggest competitor, the founder of a startup called SwipeCast. And that guy is Matias, my current co-founder today. When we met, I realized that he had the exact same challenges despite us being on different sides of the table. We realized that we were both trying to solve the same challenges while not being at the same companies. So we decided to start Attention together a year later. The reason why we started was to fix our problems within our previous startups.

So I'm biased—I am a longtime Attention user. I think it is, as I said, the best platform out there for a plethora of reasons, other than the fact that it records my calls, which I think is like such a minute portion of what you do. But one of the things that intrigues me and intrigued me to work with you, Anish, is that you're a multi-time founder, right? Like, this isn't your first rodeo. And I think a lot of first-time founders struggle with how to get it right in that first build—what to do, what not to do—because there are so many assumptions about what industry best practices or VCs are telling you. Like, "Go hire 15 sales reps and just sell." Talk to us. You know, as you're in startup number two, what are some of these assumptions that you've said "forget it, I'm not going to do this the traditional way, and I'm going to do this my way" that is allowing you to see the growth that you're seeing at Attention?

Yeah, so think of starting your first startup as buying your first car, right? You're going to bump it everywhere. You're going to crash it a few times—not too hard, but still—you're going to learn a lot. You're going to be a better driver. And then you get a second, nicer car. It's exactly the same, right?

Over at Mixer, especially, it was a bootstrap business. We had to think very deeply about how to grow our business profitably in the most efficient way possible. And after doing that for six years, it makes you a warrior. And also, I mean, man, there were tough times where I had to eat just pasta with butter every single day. My kid loves pasta with butter.

Mine too.

Mine too. Maybe they're entrepreneurs. Maybe they can just work in the entrepreneurship field.

You go through really tough times, and at that point, you actually start thinking with the most intensity and passion about how to run your startup. And those are things that not only you know from a best practice perspective, but also how to think about things perspective. You end up being a better second-time founder.

Some of the things were: A, get to product-market fit before you hit the accelerator on growth. And when I spoke with Matias before we started Attention, he had the exact same lesson. We sat over coffee, and I asked him, "Hey, what are the top ten lessons that you learned from your first startup?" And he said, "Hit the accelerator on growth after you reach product-market fit." That was the biggest one, right? Then there were other things, which included: hire excellent talent and don't be afraid to pay over market prices to get the right types of people, because the cost of hiring the wrong person will kill your company. So about seven out of those ten were exactly the same.

And today, basically the way we operate is: A, we really try to go from first principles. We think, especially with AI, the world is changing. There are so many hypotheses that have to be questioned. So how do you go back to first principles? How do you try to operate differently? This is how we spend 99% of our time—just trying to think. Every morning, we come up with shower thoughts about "Hey, maybe we should try to do these things differently," and that might create different results.

When it comes to VCs, at the end of the day, we have a great relationship with our VCs. And whenever we walk into a meeting, I feel like we both learn from each other. It's not just us learning from them, but also us teaching them things about our discoveries. And that has been a great relationship. And at the end of the day, I think that's how most founder relationships should be with VCs.

I love that. So you talked about dealing with setbacks and challenges. Share one moment in the journey—whether at Attention or even earlier—that things didn't go as planned and the navigation that you did to change that setback into a setup and lessons you learned.

Yeah, of course. I think in order to be successful, you have to iterate as many times as possible and as quickly as possible. So I'll just take the example with Attention. When building Attention, we were thinking about two things: A, real-time sales coaching, and B, filling up your CRM. We started with real-time sales coaching. And within four to eight weeks of putting this in the hands of users, we realized that it didn't have as strong a product-market fit as filling up the CRM. So within those eight weeks, we said to ourselves, "You know what, let's just actually put 100% of our efforts into filling your Salesforce or your HubSpot based on what's happening in those conversations." And that's where very quickly our users said, "Hey, I love this," and started giving us a lot more feedback instead of going radio silent on us, right? So that early setback just got us to pivot very quickly and put all of our efforts into something that was going to have tighter PMF.

Product-market fit—PMF—is arguably the single most important thing you need as a founder in a startup. Dale and I talk about it all the time—all day with multiple founders, clients or otherwise—every single day. And you did something kind of interesting, and I'd love to know your thought process here. Like, you're in a really hyper-competitive space, right? Like, you compete against people that are very well known with very big brands, and you're winning. What made you decide to go into that space and compete against the big boys? And how are you distinguishing and changing your go-to-market motion to win against them when no one else has been able to do that?

Yeah, that's a really interesting one. Believe it or not, I have no idea what competitor platforms look like, you know? And that allowed us to just build from first principles, as I was saying earlier, just trying to understand. The way we've been building is just: talk to customers, identify what's missing for them, what are the biggest gaps, and build, right? And that allowed us to just keep building.

At the end of the day, you know what Paul Graham says? Just ignore your competitors. You know, most startups just die by suicide instead of anything else. So that's how we've been building—just talk to your customers, understand what is their single biggest pain point, and build on that. And at the end of the day, that's...

How we've been building our product and ignoring every single competitive feature. And that's worked out for us, right? We just keep releasing in public whenever we have a new feature. We release it very publicly on LinkedIn. We get people very excited, and then we keep selling. And we've always ignored competition.

I think that's super important because I think you can always try to figure out the "me too" or "I got to get a different feature." What's that feature functionality? Whereas if you do it from a mindset of what the industry is asking for without having bias towards a product that's already in the market, it's super important. I think too many companies try to do "me too" following up versus something that is going to change the trajectory of the market, which is the same thing when you're looking at how to grow the company from a go-to-market perspective. You could be like, "We should do it just because XYZ company did it," but the growth hack that you guys are doing in the go-to-market is super interesting to us. So talk to us a little bit about your growth hacks and the thought process in growth hacking your go-to-market.

Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, I'll just add to it. You said that most companies don't even really know what their customers need and try to build feature parity with their competition. Michael, our founder Matias, always said, "Hey, if you just try to figure out feature parity, by the time you get there, your competitors will be far ahead of you, right?" So we just try to build by listening to our customers and ignoring whatever else is happening within competition.

Now, when it comes to growth hacking, what I like to call it is "growth stacking," right? You have a lot of different funnels of acquisition, and you have to run as many experiments as possible. So you go with one funnel, it works, you end up figuring out that it works really well, you keep going on it, and you double down on it. And by the time you have everything automated, you add the second stack of growth funnel and the third one, and so on.

In the early days, we started selling by doing LinkedIn cold outreach. And because I had a pretty good LinkedIn profile, people were interested in talking to me, so that was a good first funnel. Then we added LinkedIn posting. I'll just post very publicly about our features, and that would resonate very well with the market and get us a ton of leads. Then we added cold outreach via email, and then we added ads, and then we added a lot of different funnels. And we just double down on whatever is winning.

Now, when it comes to growth hacking, I could talk about this for ages, but the main thing is try to think about what really works at a manual level, right? How you reach out to a person manually, and then you try to think about how you can replicate those things using AI. Not the opposite. What I see in the market is a lot of people try to think, "Hey, what can AI do at scale?" But you know what? If your messaging sucks, and you do it with AI at scale, it's always going to suck. So you're just going to have scaled shitty messaging.

Exactly. And people are going to hate you. So no, just think about how you can write something very compelling, and then replicate that very compelling message. So when my reps joined Attention, the first thing I had them do is, "Hey, you're going to write your first 200 cold emails manually. We're going to figure out what emails worked out really well, and then we'll start replicating them with AI."

I love that. That growth hacking through growth stacking—I like it. You know, it's funny when you talk about it. There's so many startups out there, big and small, that want to compare themselves to others or focus on what others are doing. And how you find that parity—and I'll even admit, I'm guilty of that, right? I sent Dale a text this weekend over someone that arguably competes with us with some snide comment that I made. And Dale was like, "Why are you even wasting the energy on this? Go back to building." And I don't consume yourself with it. And it took me a minute because my initial reaction any time Dale criticizes me is to tell him that he's wrong, which he usually is. But in this case, it was like, "You're right. Like, what do I care? Because if I'm so focused on what they are or are not doing, what I'm not doing is building our business. Or I'm just trying to focus on the people that they're speaking to, which may or may not be the people we speak to."

So I love that you kind of talk about how that's not the guiding principle and that you don't focus on the competitors of the world. But I'd imagine as successful as Attention is, like, it's not all rainbows and unicorns, right? Like, there's got to be times where you look back at something that was going wrong, something was about to break, and you're like, "That was a critical inflection point, right? I made a decision, and it changed the trajectory of either Attention or Mixpanel." To be honest, because what we're trying to do is speak to founders who are just going through this and don't know how. I'd love to talk through what one of those decisions or inflection points was where you look back and you're like, "This changed the trajectory of the company for better or for worse."

Because the follow-up is going to be, "What would you have done differently?"

Yeah, ever feel like keeping your CRM updated with call notes is a nightmare? You're not alone. Most sales leaders would rate their CRM hygiene a four out of ten. Badly maintained CRMs lead to inaccurate data, missed opportunities, and a messy sales pipeline. Not ideal, right?

Introducing Attention, your sales rep's personal Iron Man suit. It transforms CRM upkeep, automating it with AI and freeing your reps to sell, not enter data. Attention fills your CRM with a single click, drafts custom follow-ups, and gives real-time assistance. Isn't it time your CRM worked for you? Ready to upgrade your sales? Visit www.attention.ai.

Yeah, that's a great question. I'm sorry you have to deal with Dale's questions. So I would say that most of mine are—I think what really changes everything for us as founders, but also as a team, is that we think very deeply about our business every single time. We question every single hypothesis, and it could be during the weekend or after work hours. We always come back and regroup the next day with, "Hey, I just had this shower thought, right? That's really important," because that shows how involved everyone is with the business.

Now, when it comes to rethinking those hypotheses and fixing whatever breaks, we operate very quickly, right? Like, I see that if someone from my team has not been selling the right way, has been doing something wrong, you know what? I'm not going to give it a quarter to fix it. We're going to fix it within the next two to four weeks. That's how quickly we have to iterate. And if within four weeks these things have not been fixed—and we don't focus on a million things, we focus on one single thing that that person has to change in order to improve things, right?

So at the end of the day, if you force your team to be in the mindset of improving one percent every single day and looking back at how they can make things much better, then at that point you have a winning team.

When I go back to the example of, you know, pivoting in early days and putting more of our efforts into CRM hygiene instead of real-time coaching, we made that decision within four to six weeks. We collected the feedback from users. We realized that they were not as passionate as they were, and also sales were not going as fast as we wished they went. So very quickly, Matias and I sat down and said, "Hey, you know what? We already have this infrastructure. The only thing we have to do—this low-hanging fruit—is capturing these transcripts and leveraging AI to fill up your CRM." And we built that. We validated this with customers. We said, "Hey, this is how we're going to do it. We're going to first sell, then we're going to build, build very quickly, and ship, and then we're going to iterate." And we did that, and that allowed us to move very quickly. Always validate things with your customers. Try to sell it. Try to see if people are willing to spend money based on whatever idea you have. And then if you're able to do it very quickly and you see kind of like they sparkle in their eyes, you're going to be able to be successful.

Yeah, one hundred percent. And so going off of that trend, I heard something from a leader one time that basically said—and it doesn't really matter if it's a startup or not, but I think it's more relevant in the startup—if you don't wake up every day trying to put yourself out of the business, like, someone's going to put you out of business, right? And so what are you guys doing from a future perspective? Because you're delivering, delivering, delivering for what's happening. But what do you guys do as an organization or as a leadership team—or do you do it as a leadership team—to wake up every morning to put yourself out of business?

I think...

When you've been bootstrapping a business for six years, you have that muscle memory, right? My biggest thought today is how do I make sure that everyone in the team is bought into the same mindset. Our team is in an office in New York, and we make sure that within our conversations every single day, we build this mindset and we get them to think exactly the same way as we do. Which is: read this article, listen to this podcast, try to think about what they're saying, and try to see how it can affect the way you're doing things.

The second thing is that my co-founder Matias and I text every single hour, even outside of work hours. He's the last text I send before going to bed and the first text I see when I wake up in the morning before going to the office. Having this echo chamber of us talking about these things all the time just makes us think about this with a lot of obsession.

The last thing—and that's actually the most important one—is always talk to your customers. You have to make sure that you're taking the right feedback. How do you differentiate signal from noise? What we finally figured out is there's a subset of our customers who can actually live in the future. It's kind of like 10% of our customer base. Those customers, we talk to them very frequently. We'll get their ideas on certain things. We'll actually listen to them a lot more than others. A lot of customers will ask you to build table stakes things. If there's a massive need, we'll end up building them. But we save 50% of our engineering resources listening to those customers that live in the future, and we try to validate things with them. That's the important part.

So tactically, if founders are listening: save 50% of your engineering resources for the customers that are actually deriving future value for your organization. It's the age-old adage, right? Is it loud or is it important? Just because someone is screaming that they want this feature doesn't mean it's important and that it's going to benefit the larger customer base. It could just be something that one person wants.

I love the fact that you guys are the first and last text. I'm now going to text my co-host every morning when I wake up, and I'm going to send him a good night text every single night before I go to sleep. He thinks I'm kidding and he's shaking his head, but I'm going to start sending him good night texts every night until he puts me on do not disturb. Something tells me I'm in his favorites.

How do you—when you're interviewing, and this is something I think a lot of founders struggle with—right, I probably feel four to six calls a week from founders about interviewing. How do you, as a startup leader, find the right talent that's going to cut it in the startup space? Because not everyone is made for the startup space. Let's just be real.

Of course. Two things. First, I filter for a quest for excellence. That's the biggest thing. Have they proven in their lives in the past or in the interview today that they're on a quest for excellence? Are they trying to be the top 1% or 0.1% in what they do? If they are—if they're obsessed with their current job, their current role, whatever they're doing, at being the actual best in the world—then that's going to be really good.

You have to think about it with the same obsession as a world-class chess player. That's how I view it. You have to always kind of think about strategies and things to always keep self-improving.

The second thing, and I'm going to get a lot of backlash for this one, is I try not to get people who speak too much about work-life balance. If you care about work-life balance, go work at Google or Meta or one of those great companies. If you come and work with us, you have to give it your 120%. You have to work 10 to 12 hours a day, and you have to also be available on weekends when I message you. I know a lot of people might not want this, and that's okay. They can work for other companies. But I want people who are obsessed with their jobs.

I think the very first job I had was in mergers and acquisitions back in France, and I was working insane weeks, right? That just made me who I am today. So I want people who are just obsessed with their jobs, obsessed with being the best at what they do.

We are huge at give to get at Revenue Reimagine. One of the things that we pride ourselves on is giving back to our audience. My understanding is you've been gracious enough to give away something that you'd like to share with a member of our audience.

I know I didn't do the scripted intro as my lovely co-host normally does, but what have you decided to share with our folks?

Yeah, of course. So one of the things that I was talking about earlier was being world-class at one thing, and that one thing that I think I'm world-class at is growth hacking. Anyone who wants to get a one-on-one session with me on growth hacking, I'll be more than happy to give that away for free.

That's really nice. I might want to sit in on that because I think what people don't realize is whether you are a special ops team that's building out support for founders, whether you are a venture-backed company, whether you are a public company, growth hacking is something that we could all use.

What do you say we jump into some rapid fire?

Go for it.

All right. If you were in tech but you can't work in tech anymore, what profession are you going to go do?

Well, if I had to redo all of my life, I would probably try to be a rockstar. That would have been my lifelong dream—being Julian Casablancas from The Strokes. Otherwise, I would probably do VC. Does VC count as an answer?

Sure.

What's the most used emoji in your work chats?

The lightning bolt from the Attn logo.

That's a good one. What's the most unusual item that we could find on your desk back in the office in New York?

Canes.

What's your candy of choice?

SweeTarts ropes. Cherry or watermelon. My mom or my girlfriend would kill me if they heard that.

Checkers or chess?

Chess. Strategy.

Other than the Revenue Reimagine podcast, what's your favorite book or podcast related to entrepreneurship?

I've been listening a lot, actually. Revenue Reimagine is within my top three. I love it. I was going to send you a screenshot of that. Within my top three—we don't even pay you to say that. We actually did have someone send it to us. They were one of our listeners. Harry Stebbings' podcast is great. Twenty VC, I think it's called that one. That's also within my top three. Within books, I would say I loved Amp It Up by Frank Suman. I read it recently.

Last one: dream vacation destination?

I want to be on a beach and just clear my mind. I love that. Hence why you're in Florida.

Anish, thank you so much for joining. Where can folks find you? Where can folks find more information about Attention?

Yeah, of course. Our website is attention.tech—T-E as in technology. You can add me on LinkedIn. Please do not email me. My inbox is destroyed. But add me on LinkedIn. Follow me on LinkedIn: Anish V. You'll find me easily there.

Awesome. Anish, thank you so much for joining. We appreciate it. If you have not checked out Attention, go check it out. I said it at the start, I said it in the middle, I'll say it again: it is the best platform out there. I do not make any money saying this. Go check out the platform. It's really super cool. Thanks for joining us, man.

Thank you guys.