Short answer: Anis Bennaceur says users stopped caring about real time coaching within weeks and buyers would not pay for it after the ZIRP era. After the pivot to auto filling the CRM, an investor told him it could be a billion dollar company.
Watch this answer from Episode 45 (starts at 8:02) · Episode 45 notes and transcript
From Episode 45: Your Pipeline Is Lying to You. This AI Fixes It After Every Sales Call, starting at 8:02.
Sam Nadler [8:02]: Amazing. Well, let's jump into attention overall. I know we quickly covered it, but give me that, like, high level. You've mentioned what attention does really well. It sounds like it's coaching. It sounds like it gives you the next step, but, like, I would love to hear from you. What is, like, the core value prop? At least when you began, and I know that can evolve or expand over time, but, like, give me that need that you had to solve in order to make attention grow to where it is today.
Anis Bennaceur [8:29]: Yeah. I'll tell you how we started and then or what made me start initially, and then what we got right over time, and just how attention simply works today. The first thing is, in my the last company that I founded, it was Bootstrap. And so every single deal mattered in the limited space that we were selling into. And so I thought to myself, hey. What if we could capture these conversations in real time and tell the seller what they should be saying during these calls so that they optimize their conversion rate. Right? In other words, just one of their deals. So we started building that, right, just like a real time coach. I'm sure you've seen Cluely, in all these other apps in the past year, but we were kind of like the first company back then to do real time coaching based on these conversations. Think of it as kinda like your GPS. And our whole value was, come for the coaching and stay for the productivity, which meant basically you would come to get coached. And once you're ramped up and didn't really need any of the coaching in real time, the productivity would mean everything related to after your calls, making you more productive, preparing you for your next conversation, and making sure that you're actually just winning more deals. We realized, after releasing the initial coaching feature that within a few weeks, users would not care about it. Buyers would not really pay for that.
Anis Bennaceur [9:59]: This was kind of like right after the ZIRP era ended, and so it was really hard to sell any of this. So I was sitting over lunch with another founder, and he tells me, hey, why don't you flip it around? Why don't you just make it come for the productivity and stay for the coaching? And at the same time, someone else was telling me coaching is the vitamin. People wanna buy pain killers. And the biggest pain killer was actually filling the CRM. Right? I remember actually having dinner early dinner with a great investor, and he tells me when I told him, oh, we pivoted from coaching to auto filling the CRM. He looks at me, and he's like, oh my god. This is gonna be a billion dollar company.
