Feedback is Power: How Interactive Sales Materials Transform Enterprise Sales Processes

Aug 17

Featuring Justin dorfman, Co-Founder and ceo of assetmule

Justin is the Co-Founder and CEO of AssetMule, a SaaS platform that helps GTM teams create sales assets in minutes. Having spent the last decade building sales and marketing practices at early-stage and hyper-growth companies, Justin has experienced, firsthand, the friction and misalignment that exists between these teams when it comes to sales collateral creation. With AssetMule, he’s on a mission to build a bridge between sales and marketing by helping these teams work better together to create high-quality personalized sales assets that win more business.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

The importance of customer-centric sales: Justin emphasizes the significance of truly understanding the customer's needs and providing tailor-made solutions. By actively listening and engaging in discovery calls, sales professionals can position themselves as problem solvers rather than just product pushers.
The shift to collaborative selling: Justin discusses a crucial moment in the sales process where both the customer and the salesperson become partners and work together to make the case internally. This shift typically occurs during the proposal process, highlighting the value of collaboration and building a shared vision.
Preparation and validation of proposals: Justin stresses the need for thorough preparation and validation of proposals with the customer. Taking the time to ensure that the proposed solution aligns with the customer's goals and challenges is essential for success.
How to ask the right questions: Justin highlights the importance of asking the right questions during the sales process. By demonstrating understanding and showcasing their expertise, sales professionals can position themselves as valuable problem solvers in the eyes of the customer.
The power of customer discovery: Justin shares his experience of conducting over 130 customer discovery interviews in the marketing and tech space. This approach allowed him to gather insights, identify emerging problems, and discover opportunities for building a product in demand.
Why you should start with building a community before launching a product: The Co-founder and CEO of Asset Mule, Justin emphasizes the significance of building a community before launching a product. By focusing on community engagement and brand-building, startups can create a strong foundation for their go-to-market strategy.
How to overcome sales and product marketing challenges: Justin discusses the friction and challenges that arise between sales and product marketing teams when it comes to creating assets and collateral. By identifying this widespread problem, he came up with the idea for Asset Mule, which aims to bridge the gap between generic collateral and salespeople's specific needs.
The importance of interactive and engaging sales assets: Justin talks about the importance of making sales assets, such as PDFs and demos, more interactive and engaging for customers. By adding features like embedded videos, live chat, and booking meeting buttons, sales professionals can enhance the overall buyer experience and increase engagement.
Why iterative development based on customer feedback matters: Justin emphasizes the value of not over-investing in engineering before understanding the product's needs. By identifying a group of design partners and incorporating their feedback into the product development process, startups can ensure that their solution addresses real needs and stands out in the market.
When to seek learning and guidance: Justin's approach to constantly learning from CEOs, founders, and industry experts demonstrates the importance of seeking guidance and being a lifelong learner. By drawing inspiration from others, reading extensively, and engaging in conversations with experienced individuals, growth and success can be achieved.

In this episode…

In this episode of the “Solutions Seekers” podcast, host Paige Buck sits down with guest Justin Dorfman, Co-Founder and CEO of AssetMule and an experienced sales professional with a passion for enterprise sales. Throughout the episode, Dorfman shares valuable insights on managing the sales process, emphasizing the importance of listening to customers, understanding their needs, and presenting tailored solutions. He highlights key moments in the sales process, such as the proposal stage, where both parties come together as partners to make the case internally. Dorfman also delves into his journey of starting a company, highlighting the significance of customer discovery and building a community before launching a product. With a diverse skill set and a deep understanding of the challenges faced by sales and product marketers, Dorfman offers practical strategies and ideas for creating interactive sales materials that engage prospects and drive successful enterprise sales - cue AssetMule, the SaaS that helps companies create high-quality personalized sales assets in minutes.

Overall, this episode is a must-listen for sales professionals, entrepreneurs, and anyone interested in understanding the intricacies of the sales process and the art of building a successful company. Dorfman's wealth of experience, coupled with his commitment to continuous learning from industry experts, makes for an insightful conversation that leaves listeners with actionable takeaways. Tune in to The Kennedy Events Podcast to gain valuable insights from Justin Dorfman and learn how to navigate the sales landscape with confidence and expertise.

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Resources Mentioned in this episode

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by Kennedy Events.

Kennedy Events creates stress-free conferences and events, providing expert management and design for all your corporate event needs—from in-person to hybrid and virtual events.

To learn more about our services, visit our website at www.kennedyevents.com and schedule a consultation today to find out how we can guide you in making your event successful.

Transcript

Justin Dorfman [00:00:00]:

Paige Buck [00:00:02]:

Welcome to the Kennedy Events Podcast. I'm your host, Paige Buck. Past guests have included Pam Perez of the Chase Center, John Silva of Culinary Eye, and Elaine Honig of Studio 4Forty.

And today I am delighted to be talking to Justin, the co-founder and CEO of Asset Mule, a SaaS platform that helps GTM teams create sales assets in minutes. Having spent the last decade building sales and marketing practices at early stage in hyper growth companies, Justin Dorfman has experienced firsthand the friction and misalignment that exists between these teams when it comes to sales collateral creation. With Asset Mule, he's on a mission to build a bridge between sales and marketing by helping these teams work better together to create high quality personalized sales assets that win more business.

Before we get started, today's episode is brought to you by Kennedy Events. Kennedy Events creates stress-free conferences and events, providing expert management and design for all your corporate event needs, from in person to hybrid and virtual. You can learn more about us at kennedyevents.com.

Justin, thank you so much for sitting through that lengthy intro and for being with me this morning. How's it going?

Justin Dorfman [00:01:14]:

It's going great. Thanks so much for having me.

Paige Buck [00:01:16]:

Yeah, I'm excited to dive in with you. So tell me where the idea for Asset Mule came from.

Justin Dorfman [00:01:23]:

So I've been in the SaaS world for a good 15 years. I started my career in SaaS in sales. I actually was an early stage startup salesperson, where when you're the first salesperson, you're sort of playing many different roles, wearing many different hats, and alongside selling, you're also creating your own content and your own assets and collateral to use. So, it partially springs from that experience, but also kind of fast forward through a couple years later, I became a product marketer, And in that role, one of my primary responsibilities was actually to support the sales team with the collateral, and luckily, I had that previous experience that put me in a decent position to do it. But I found that there was a lot of friction and a lot of challenges between those two teams working together to create the right assets. And specifically, sales sort of are dealing day to day with different situations, different buyers, different needs, and they need assets to be able to speak to those needs. And product marketers, generally speaking, are not big teams, right? There's usually, in some cases, one product marketer supporting a team of 10 or 20 salespeople, and they are sort of being bombarded with all these requests and can't deliver those assets at the speed that sales needs them. So there's a lot of salespeople going rogue and tension between the two teams as collateral is created that's perhaps not on brand or on message. And I saw this opportunity here to scratch an itch that I felt. But also we went out there and we spoke to a lot of salespeople and product marketers and found that, hey, this is actually not a unique problem to what I felt. It's something that is pretty widespread out there, and an opportunity might exist to fix this. So, that's kind of how the idea of Asset Mule came around and the journey that we're on right now.

Paige Buck [00:03:29]:

To me we're a really small team. And even in our really small team, I can appreciate and imagine what some of that friction and misalignment looks like in a larger team. Because yeah, you go have a conversation and you come back and you're like, what they really want is or what we really need– the way we really need to position ourselves is. And I don't have anything that says exactly that or shows exactly that, but I'm just projecting. What are some of the most common misalignments that you see from both of these seats?

Justin Dorfman [00:04:01]:

Yeah, I think it's exactly that. I think the product marketing team is doing the best that they can to create the collateral that sales needs. But again, they're creating something that needs to be usable across many different scenarios. So in the end, the asset becomes quite generic, right? It speaks to the high level value proposition and use cases. It has a couple of quotes in there, hopefully, and stats that are relevant for most situations. But again, every buyer is different. And a salesperson may feel like that quote is not the right quote, right. It's not the right persona or not the right industry. That stat might not speak to the exact use case. And when they reach back out to the product marketer to create an updated asset, again, the product marketer is not just dealing with asset creation, but they're launching products. They're managing competitive strategies. So many other things on their plate that they can't deliver that stuff in time. So the salesperson goes off and creates that stuff themselve, and then maybe they create multiple versions of that off each other, and then eventually this new slide deck or this new one pager gets on the product marketer's desk and it's unrecognizable.

Paige Buck [00:05:12]:

Right, and their heads explode.

Justin Dorfman [00:05:14]:

Exactly. So what we've tried to do is sort of create this centralized platform that both teams can use where there's a set of templates in there that the product marketing team has created, one-pagers, decks, and so on, that the sales team can either use as is, if it speaks specifically to their buyer. But also what we're calling a snippet library. And a snippet library is essentially quotes, stats, images, logos, just blocks of content, essentially, that a salesperson can swap in and out of an asset to personalize it for their buyer, but with the assurance that it's pre-approved and that it's something that the product marketing team is comfortable with being out there in the world. And that's kind of the V-zero, if you will, of the value proposition is just creating this alignment between the two teams, where personalization at the speed of sales is able to happen. But product marketing still knows that the integrity of that messaging and the branding is aligned with the brand guidelines.

Paige Buck [00:06:23]:

Nice. It sounds really attractive. I mean, I can already picture it. It sounds really easy and attractive and appealing to both ends. I can pull this in, I can make it look the way I want it to. I feel like I have a level of control if I'm the salesperson. The product marketer, it sounds like, has brand and image control.

Justin Dorfman [00:06:43]:

Yeah, we also noticed a couple of different– so that was kind of the first insight that we got and sort of what we took out to customer discovery conversations. And we spoke to about 130 different sales and product marketers, sales reps and product marketers to kind of validate this idea. And there were actually a couple of other problems that sort of came to surface on both the product marketing side and the sales folks that we’re exploring solving as well. On the product marketing side, the other piece was the reason why product marketers can't operate at the speed of sales. One is, I mentioned, they have a lot of stuff on their plate. Product marketers tend to have a lot of different varying responsibilities that are conflicting with one another. So that's one piece. But the other piece is that they have a dependency in a design partner, right? A design team that's sometimes in house but a lot these days is actually an external consultant designer. And to get the new designed one-pager or deck can take a week or two, right? Yeah. So what we've also tried to build into the platform is more of a self-serve design tool. So if you think about– we're kind of following in the footsteps of some of our web page design systems that now exist, like Instapage and those drag and drop WYSIWYG sort of solutions. We're trying to follow a similar path for the product marketer as well, where they can actually build their own templates into the system without having to rely on design resources, but pulling from a sort of library of components. And again, because we're so focused on this “sales asset” use case, we can be pretty prescriptive and make sure that all the components that they need are available to them. So that's one piece and then I'd say on the sales side, a really interesting discovery was just that sales assets are pretty boring, right? They tend to be PDFs, right? They're static. They're boring. They're one dimensional. And the funny thing is, we're not printing these things off anymore, right? Most people are viewing these PDFs on their web browser, right? So there's no reason for them to be so boring and static. So we found that there's an opportunity here to perhaps make them more interactive, right, more engaging. And there's small things that you can do like video and things like that, that you can embed in a deck or a one-pager to make it more interesting. But also things like building a live chat into an asset so that if a prospect has a conversation, they can have a chat with their sales rep right then and there or a book a meeting button right into the asset or things like that. Widgets that they can interact with that make it more interesting for the buyer and more useful for the buyer, but also gives the salesperson a little bit of feedback on what's happening behind closed doors when they throw that asset over the fence, right? So the customer discovery process, I would say it's really fascinating because you might start with one problem and one sort of solution in mind. But as you peel back the onion, a lot of these discoveries come up that are really fascinating and start to put pieces together to a product that is pretty complete in terms of its workflow and functionality that just started with the seed of an idea. So it's been really, really fascinating.

Paige Buck [00:10:12]:

Absolutely. You're reminding me, we use HubSpot on a pretty basic level because– we're a boutique, right? So, like two or three dozen customers is a really good year for us. We're not doing anything at volume when it's that customized and specialized. But when we send a proposal over to a client after we've pitched, and we're using HubSpot for sending that and seeing how they engage with it, I understand it gives like, oh, they opened it, which is like our primary concern. Did they open the damn thing or did they never look at it again? And then did they send it on? How many opens? But that quickly gets really skewed when you're like, how is it they've opened it 130 times in an hour? What is it actually capturing there? Like they toggled past that. They woke up their browser. I can't really tell what's going on. I love that you're talking about something that's more inviting, a different level of engagement that lets you see what's resonating for the client. That's really fascinating.

Justin Dorfman [00:11:12]:

Yeah. Some ideas that we're just exploring are things like, again, decks traditionally, or one pagers will have images, right? So there's video, and you can talk about, did they watch the video? How long did they watch in the video? But there's also interactive demo products, too, that can integrate into an asset, where the prospect can actually try out an interactive demo and point and click, and you can see what they're interested in. And it can give you feedback on that to things like ROI calculators that help tell a story of the potential ROI of the solution that you're selling. And if you know that you're a champion, or even better, maybe they shared it with their CFO and the CFO put some digits, some numbers into the ROI calculator and is exploring that. That's really interesting feedback and insight for a salesperson to see what's happening behind the scenes because a salesperson really in a sales process, let's say a six to nine month sales process, really enterprise sales process, spends a really small amount of time actually speaking with their prospect, right?. A lot of the times is actually just preparing your champion to pitch for you and make a case for this. Right. So being able to see what's happening and get some feedback on that is, I think, a game changer for salespeople.

Paige Buck [00:12:32]:

Tell me more about that and how someone in that sales role, I guess, learns the nuances of the individual champion. And what have you found works in terms of building them up to actually evangelize for you inside their company?

Justin Dorfman [00:12:52]:

Yeah, it's an interesting question and the way that I think about it– so I mentioned that I was a salesperson first, and I spent about ten years in sales and enterprise sales, and I found that there was always– if you manage the sales process the right way, right? And what I mean by managing the sales process the right way is really listening to your customer, your prospect, getting a really deep understanding of their need and proving to them that you understand their need by presenting them a solution that specifically solves that need. And that's done through discovery calls and tailored demos, what I used to call solution presentations. Because again, it's not just a demo of a product, you're presenting the solution to the challenge that you discovered. There's a point in that conversation where you can feel it, right? It turns from you sitting across the table from your prospect to you guys actually now sitting on the same side of the table. And for me, as a salesperson, it would usually be in the proposal process, where you've put together a proposal for a solution for your prospect and you're not presenting it to them and their boss yet and so on. You're doing this prep call almost right, where you're walking through it with them. You're filling in some information that might be missing in it. You're kind of validating that what you've put on paper is accurate. During that conversation, you can start to feel this shift where now they've bought into the solution, they know it's the right solution for them, and now you guys are going to work together to make the case internally. So I think that's really where it happens, and it's all that work that leads up to that moment in terms of really asking the right questions, repeating those questions back, and just making it clear that you're not just trying to sell them something, you're trying to solve a problem for them. And you understand what the problem is on a deep level, and you're in a position where you can actually put together a solution that could solve that problem.

Paige Buck [00:14:52]:

Before we got started, you were telling me about your co-founders and what your team looks like right now. Would you share that a little bit with our audience? Like who else is behind the scenes making this happen or out in front?

Justin Dorfman [00:15:03]:

Yeah, no, absolutely. So right now we're a team of three. So it's myself and two co-founders. I'm the sort of CEO of the company, but today I'm really playing a lot of the role of a product manager. As I mentioned, I'm sort of selling to myself in a way. I was a product marketer, I was a salesperson, so scratching my own itch, I'm sort of leading that process as the person that's trying to solve the pain point that I felt and can empathize with the pain point of these folks that I'm talking to. Our other co-founder, George, is our GTM, sort-of, co-founder. You know, one thing that we really believed in and that we wanted to make part of our go-to-market strategy from the very beginning is sort of building a community before even launching a product, right? Being part of the conversation, creating value and building an audience that then you can launch to. We've heard a lot of people out there have a ton of success with that path, and it's something that we really wanted to make part of our go-to-market strategy. So George is the perfect person to lead that effort in prior sort of startups and in his own personal sort of passion. He's built podcasts and he's built communities and events and all kinds of things. So he's sort of laying the groundwork of our brand essentially and building out our audience and our community. And then our other co-founder is Dane Lyons. So Dane is our technical co-founder. He's an incredibly talented engineer, full-stack engineer, which makes it really incredible for us because he can do everything from the back-end challenges to the front-end design, and he also is a company builder, not just a product builder. So he's been through several startups, he started his own in the past, and he really gets sort of the process not just from an engineering standpoint, but from a company building standpoint. So it's a really interesting team that we have. A small, but I think pretty diverse skill set, and one that I think is really relevant for the market that we're building for.

Paige Buck [00:17:14]:

It sounds like a smart, like, you've got all of the right seats for where you are right now. Because I've certainly seen and we've had clients who are in several stages ahead of you, but where they started as, like, two engineers, and one of them had to begrudgingly, be like, okay, I'll go out there and talk to people. Or, I'll try to actually express why someone would want this instead of just building the thing in your garage.

Justin Dorfman [00:17:42]:

Yeah. And I'll say the other thing that's kind of interesting about us is that we've known each other for a long time, or at least I've known george and I've known Dane individually for ten years, right, so we've known each other for a long time. George I met at the first Sastra conference. We sort of found out very quickly that we are sort of made from the same cloth, right? We're startup guys that just love this, and we've stayed connected throughout the years, collaborated on a couple of different things. And then Dane is actually the partner, the husband of the CMO of a company that I worked for previously, where I worked very closely with her at the time. She was the VP of sales, and I was the head of sales development and we were sort of partners in crime, and I met Dane through her. You know, we connected on, yeah, product building and startup building. So the start of this all was George and I were both figuring out what our next things were, and we're sort of venting on interview processes and so on. And George made the comment, you know, hey, what if we just started something? Wouldn't that be awesome? Like, I wish we could just do that, we just need a technical co-founder, right? And I happened to be having a parallel conversation because Evy Lyons, who as I mentioned was the CMO that I worked with previously, was trying to convince me at the time not to join another company but to start my own thing. And she had connected me with her partner Dane as a potential technical co-founder. So I brought the conversations together and yeah, immediately I think the first part of the conversations actually weren't about what we want to build or what space we even want to build in, but it was about what type of company we want to build, right? What are the values we want to really put forth in a company that we would build, and we just aligned on that to start with as we really thought about company building in a lot of the same ways. We had similar experiences in the past that had led us there, and then it came to, well, what space are we passionate about building? And all of us have played in the sales and marketing tech space. So very quickly we were aligned on that as well. And then it was about sort of figuring out, okay, now we kind of know what company and what sort of space we want to build in, what are the problems that exist out there? And it's interesting because one thing that in the past has held me back from starting a company is I never felt like I had a good enough idea to start a company, and I always felt like you had to have an idea to start a company. But kind of through this process, what I've learned is that even if you don't have an idea, if you know sort of the space that you want to build in, and you start to speak to a lot of people that operate in that space, very quickly you'll start to see trends on problems that emerge and exist and come up with ideas. And actually that might be a better place to start. If you start with a problem, you may end up coming up with an idea and a product that people actually want. Versus, if you start with the idea, everybody tells the story of a startup as this light bulb idea, and then they go out to market. But actually, I think that path more frequently than not leads to building something that people don't actually want. So it was kind of interesting how this led us down a better path, I think.

Paige Buck [00:21:15]:

I hear so much wisdom in what you're saying. I just wrote down like three things. One, and I want to ask you about each of them, I heard you say that you started from the values that you wanted in a company. Two, that only then did you start thinking about the space that you wanted to be in. And three, that you came in, and what I heard in that is like, you were all willing to set ego aside. You don't have to say, like, we know best, we have all the answers. We've already got it figured out. That's what I feel like I hear so much in other entrepreneurs that makes me think, one, I'm not like you, that's not me, I don't have that. But also, how do you know anyone's going to want that thing? And how do you know that by the time– who makes you think you can build it best? There's also that too. Just because you have the idea doesn't mean you're the person to deliver it, where it sounds like the three of you have circled up around something you know and you know you can do.

Justin Dorfman [00:22:18]:

Yeah.

Paige Buck [00:22:19]:

And you've done a lot of listening.

Justin Dorfman [00:22:21]:

Yeah, we did a lot of listening. So we had yeah, we spoke to over 130 people, and we continued to listen. Right. So in that process of customer discovery, we started by just asking questions. No product, nothing to show. Again, we knew that we wanted to sort of play in the marketing and tech space. We did know a little bit that there was a problem around, as I mentioned, that I had experience around asset creation and stuff, but we didn't know what the solution was. So we asked who's creating assets? What are the biggest challenges? And things like that. We started to hear this sort of friction a little bit between the two practices and some of the other things that I mentioned as well, the lack of interactability and engagement with assets, the challenges from a product marketer to create assets. All these things started to pop up. So then we built a very minimal prototype that we started to demo in these conversations. And again, we started the conversations not showing the product but asking those questions and then leading into showing this prototype. And as we had those conversations, people would say, oh, this looks awesome, but it would be really great if it did this, or have you thought about how you're going to approach this problem? Which started to give us ideas on putting sort of layers to that prototype which got us, I think, to what people would call an MVP. And then now we're actually–

Paige Buck [00:23:45]:

Unpack that. What is that?

Justin Dorfman [00:23:46]:

So the MVP is basically the minimal viable product, right? And it's a key principle in the Lean Startup methodology of building, where we've built something that is at its minimum level in terms of features and capabilities, but can deliver on the sort of promised value, right? It doesn't have all the bells and whistles. It's sort of got the minimum level of functionality that can deliver on that value or at least paint the picture.

Paige Buck [00:24:16]:

You gotta hook somebody on that, or you start like, well, because we've all seen products that over promise and then can't do half the things or can't do them well.

Justin Dorfman [00:24:26]:

Yeah. And in this case, I think what you're trying to do is not over invest on the engineering before you really know that that's what the needed product is, right? So you sort of build the minimum version of it. And what we've done is we've essentially identified ten or so people from those conversations that we had that really had the need, were really excited about the solution, and we brought them on as what we're calling design partners. And what that means is that they're actually using the product day in and day out, and they're telling us what are the reasons why they can't use it for a certain use case. What's missing? What's sort of the barrier to usage, as well as what are the areas that really are solving a need and are differentiated out of the market that we can lean further into. And we're working with them over the next couple of months to again, sort of add these layers to the product to get us to a V-one, right, where we can launch this more publicly. And the idea through all of this is again, not to believe in that we know best and that we lock ourselves in a room and spend six months a year building this product and putting out in market hoping that it solves a problem, but sort of building it iteratively based on customer feedback, so that the end thing is something that people value and want to use and will use.

Paige Buck [00:25:46]:

What are one or two of the things that arose for the three of you when you were discussing the company values? That you wanted.

Justin Dorfman [00:25:54]:

All of us, all three of us, I think, have sort of gone through the standard Silicon Valley sort of root story, right, which is like, you go out there, you get a couple of initial customers, you then raise a lot of money, and you try and grow this thing as fast as possible and grow at all costs. And I think we've felt the dark side of that, We decided early on that this is not the approach that we want to take and instead we want to build a sustainable business, right? And that may mean that we can't do certain things early on, but what it does allow us to do is really focus on delivering customer value, right? So that was something that we sort of aligned on very early on, is that we want to build a business that, number one, solves a real problem, delivers value that people are willing to pay for, and we want to grow at a pace that is sustainable in terms of profitability and that we can stand on our own feet, but also that doesn't burn us out.

Paige Buck [00:27:09]:

You mean like profit comes in there into the picture somewhere in the first couple of years?

Justin Dorfman [00:27:17]:

Exactly! Early on. I think it's funny because in Silicon Valley that sounds guess but you know, you speak to anybody outside of Silicon Valley and that's how you build a business. I think that we're starting to see a little bit of shift as well in the macro environment and that maybe more companies are going to take this approach hopefully. But that's at least something that we aligned on very early on. The other piece I would say is that we wanted to build a business where again we enjoy working on this. We enjoy working with each other, we enjoy working on this problem, and we don't lose sight of that. And again, I think this grow-at-all-costs model sometimes pushes you down paths that you didn't originally want to go down, or that you didn't intend to, and sort of in some cases can make you lose track of the vision. And what you started this thing for at the very beginning. So I think that's something that all of us wanted to keep in mind and as we continue to grow, always revisit, right? Are we continuing to build a company that we enjoy building with people that we enjoy building and that is making a meaningful difference for a market that we want to build for?

Paige Buck [00:28:44]:

I love that because I had another guest recently say that she had heard at a keynote for the event we produced last year, the keynote said, how did they say it? If you bake it in then it will always be true. Like for your product, for your company, for your team. But if you bolt it on then it will fall off. So in this case they were talking about a promise for diversity, equity, and inclusion, and it was like if you just say like oh yeah, sure, that's something we care about right now. Then as soon as that person leaves or the climate changes or anything happens, that will fall away. As part of your values from the beginning, then you kind of always come back to that as your touchstone and you've got that. I love that. It's just beautiful. A lot of people don't start there.

Justin Dorfman [00:29:33]:

Yeah. And I don't know, I think it's something that was important to all of us. It does feel weird at the very beginning when you're thinking, okay, we want to build this product to step back and start there, but I think it's going to pay dividends throughout the years. And again, I don't think that it means that we'll never raise money or that we'll never want to scale this thing. It's just like to make sure that whichever path we go down, that we're meeting this criteria that we said at the very beginning, that we're still building on a path for a product that means a lot to us and a company that means a lot to us, and we're solving problems that we're engaged and passionate about.

Paige Buck [00:30:14]:

Nice. So I imagine that your customer conversations help you with this and also the GTM community building helps with this. But so much is changing so fast, and you just say like the two letters, AI, and everybody freaks the F out. But how do you stay on top while you're in this building phase? How do you stay on top of the problems and the challenges that you used to really observe because you were in it, and now you're out of it, how do you stay on top of that?

Justin Dorfman [00:30:49]:

It's a good question because I thought about that a lot. And partially at this stage it's easier because although in some ways I'm out of it, a lot of the work that I'm doing right now is still product marketing, and I'm still in it. At some point, though, to your point, hopefully if we're successful and we grow the company, I will have to move a little bit beyond sort of the day-to- day, hands-on stuff. So I think staying in tune with your customers is critical for that. And making sure that you never lose that goal of speaking to X amount of customers, whether it be five. Right now, my goal is at least to speak to a customer or a potential customer every day. So maybe it's keeping that sort of commitment. And making sure that you're staying in tune with what's going on and what the real challenges are. And it's interesting that you bring up AI because obviously that's the number one question that everybody gets these days.

Paige Buck [00:31:51]:

To the point of eye-rolling for me. Yes, absolutely. But it's real.

Justin Dorfman [00:31:55]:

Yeah, we get it as well, is how are you going to use AI for this? And I'm sure we will. That's definitely part of the plan. I'm a believer in AI. I think it is going to have an incredible impact on a lot of different workflows and solve a lot of problems. But that's the key, I think, that you need to make sure that it's solving a problem. Right? So there's a lot of solutions out there that perhaps took an AI first approach. They're like, okay, AI is a trend. Let's build something with AI and then we'll figure out how to apply it to a problem. And I think the approach, again, it goes back to our values, one of our values being solve real problems, to ask ourselves, okay, this is the problem that we're solving. How can AI help solve that problem better? Versus starting with AI and then trying to find a problem to solve with it. So that's at least the approach that we've been taking. And again, as an example of how you can use your values in a day-to-day sort of use case.

Paige Buck [00:33:05]:

Yeah, it's brilliant. It's funny because as we're talking about it and just what I'm learning, I'm realizing how fast I think that the word or the letters AI can start to sound like cloud did a decade ago, where you're like, you just mean that it's not on my computer. That's all that means. It's just in servers somewhere other than in my office. Pretty basic. But we're still talking about the cloud.

Justin Dorfman [00:33:33]:

Yep, yep. And I mean, you see this with a lot of technologies. I've been lucky enough to be a part of a couple of different sort of shifts, paradigm shifts, if you will. So my first company that I worked at was a cloud computing startup in the early days before even AWS existed and so on. And then I went through a company that was in the influencer marketing space, which was a big sort of big paradigm shift and a lot of buzz around that.

Paige Buck [00:34:04]:

What even is influencer? What it was but like not a word.

Justin Dorfman [00:34:08]:

Yeah, exactly. And then most recently in the crypto and blockchain space, which I think is probably the most extreme example of where suddenly everybody is trying to think about, okay, like web3, what's the web3 version of this, this and that? And again, I think all of these technologies, by the way, that I mentioned, AI, web3, and blockchain and cloud and influencer marketing, again, I think all bring a lot of value. But again, it comes back to what is the problem that they're solving for? And first of all, can it add value in solving for that problem? And if so, how? Right? Rather than starting with the technology and then trying to work back to a problem.

Paige Buck [00:34:52]:

Yeah, it's really smart. That's like your grounding principle. I love it. So in thinking about this also, just in terms of how you stay on top of things, are there mentors or people you really admire in this space that you try to stay in touch with or pay attention to what they're doing?

Justin Dorfman [00:35:11]:

Absolutely. So there's sort of two degrees, I would say. One is people that I've worked with, There are CEOs or founders in the past that I've worked on their startups, that I've learned a lot from throughout the years and have shown a lot of faith and investment in me and helping me progress my career. So, I continue to stay in touch with those folks. I think they're excited that I'm building my own thing, and they're very encouraging and they're very open to providing feedback. So there's folks like that that I'm close to, and then there are people out there that I'm a student of the game, so I read a lot. When I am facing a new challenge or a new situation, I go out there and talk to people, or I try and learn as much as I can about it. And there are certain people that I definitely turn to and admire on that front. You know, some people that come to mind. Dave Gerhardt is a sort of marketing guru. I think he'd sort of not like me calling him that, a guru. No. In a sense, the reason I bring him up is when I first took on my first product marketing role, I didn't know what product marketing was at all. And he's somebody that I turned to, and I started listening to his podcast, started becoming part of his community. And really the fundamentals of what I learned for product marketing came out of that. So he's still somebody that I follow a lot and learn a lot from. April Dunford, she wrote a book on positioning and messaging called, “Obviously Awesome.” And again, it's one of the books that sort of really opened my eyes to what positioning and messaging is and how to actually do it and how important it is and sort of how it feeds into everything else you do in sales and marketing. So I'd say she's somebody that I definitely look to. And then now, as I enter the role of sort of founder and CEO, I'm following a lot of the folks that talk about the Lean Startup and the Lean Methodologies, right? From Eric Ries, who wrote the original, “Lean Startup” book, to Ash Maurya, who wrote a book called, “Running Lean.” A lot of the principles that I mentioned today that we're following in terms of customer discovery and learning from the market, and iterating on our solution come from those learnings. So I'm a big learner. There's a lot of people out there that I kind of turn to for guidance and for experience.

Paige Buck [00:37:54]:

I love that. I love that. And you're unafraid to learn the role of CEO as you go. So much of that is what you're already doing, it’s brilliant. Thank you so much, Justin. I really appreciate your time. And would you take a moment just to share with our audience where they can find you?

Justin Dorfman [00:38:13]:

Yeah. So probably the best place is on LinkedIn. So if you just look up Justin Dorfman, I'm sure there's maybe a handful out there, but the one that is with Asset Mule, that's me. Feel free to connect with me there. And as I mentioned, I'm really interested at this point in talking to people that would find our products valuable. That have the challenges that we're solving for and even that would be interested in being an early tester. We're definitely onboarding our first beta customers and working very closely with them to build out this solution to make sure that we're building something that drives value. So if that's you, reach out to me on LinkedIn, and I'd love to chat.

Paige Buck [00:38:53]:

Brilliant. Thank you so much for your time. Just to close us out, it's been a pleasure talking to Justin Dorfman, co-founder and CEO of Asset Mule. Thanks so much, Justin.

Justin Dorfman [00:39:03]:

Thanks for having me.

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