Mentoring notes with Andrus Purde
“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”–a Greek quote made famous by Isaiah Berlin
I first met Andrus while the two of us were pitching at the Estonian shark tank in 2012. A year later, we got to work on a marketing-related slide deck for Pipedrive. We’re different animals. To keep it simple, he’s a hedgehog — driven by one big question: “What’s the smallest thing you could build?”. I, in turn, am a fox puzzled by the science of complexity.
Because of this difference and the fact that the man has some sick skills in the marketing domain, I wanted to pick Andrus’s brain. It had to do with a problem I’m solving with my on-going research.
Here are some of the takeaways from our 45-minute Introwise session.
Outfunnel is a sales-centric marketing automation tool. Andrus is its CEO and co-founder. They’ve raised $1.3 mln to date, and they’re still working on positioning and the pitch. Outfunnel is Andrus’s 5th business, give or take (the actual number is somewhere between 5 and 10).
This time around, he “got tired of failing” and decided to conduct interviews within his immediate network. He did this first to discover the problem instead of starting with a solution. His network consisted of SMEs, some larger enterprise customers. It came about due to his B2B SaaS work while at Pipedrive. He knew that he wanted his next venture to do with marketing software but didn’t know the exact focus.
To find out, he started with 20–30 interviews and moved up to around 60. There was selection bias in his sample. At first, he got super lost. There were so many needs among those voices. Yet, bit by bit, he started noticing patterns in the conversations. One had to do with the little pain of syncing data between services like Pipedrive, Hubspot, and Mailchimp. This one, in particular, led him to his main ‘aha!’ moment.
He knew himself. The market for enterprise software felt alien to him with its 6 to 12-month sales cycles. The B2C category wasn’t his thing. So, he stuck to what he knew best–SME SaaS. His take is that’s what investors prefer–a founder doing what he knows well. In Andrus’s case he believes in super simple products that don’t need a sales team and instead have a self-service setup. Pipedrive, his previous employer, came to my mind, as it had the same origin story.
Andrus is an angel investor parallel to running Outfunnel.
On investing
He looks at three things.
- Is the company operating in the marketing software space? Can he give insight and provide added value based on his years of experience?
- Does the company have a founder or an investor that Andrus knows well?
- Is the company providing a solution in the GreenTech category?
Book recommendations
Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don’t Make Sense
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26210508-alchemy
Example: installing screen displays in trains instead of spending millions on brand new ones. This act alone can improve commuter satisfaction scores at a fraction of the cost.
The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52283963-the-mom-test
Takeaway: stop reading everything else, and buy this book.
Read more on Outfunnel’s early validation
