[Raised $300k] Ep.140 - The First 100 with Bethany Stachenfeld, the co-founder of Sendspark

Bethany Stachenfeld is the co-founder of Sendspark, a technology that makes it easy for businesses to create and send personalized videos to strengthen relationships with customers at every stage of the buyer journey. Founded in Jan 2019 by Brandon Escalante and Bethany Stachenfeld, Sendspark provides a video outreach platform for businesses to record and send personalized videos to buyers over email. With the platform, users can record videos from their browser, customize video landing pages, and share videos through email or a public URL. 

Where to find Bethany Stachenfeld:

• Website: Sendspark | Record and Share Personalized Videos
• LinkedIn (4) Bethany Stachenfeld | LinkedIn

Where to find Hadi Radwan:

• Newsletter: Principles Friday | Hadi Radwan | Substack
• LinkedIn: Hadi Radwan | LinkedIn

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Transcript

Let's do it. Broadcasting from around the world. You're listening to the first 100. A podcast on how founders acquired their first 100 paying customers. Here's your host, Hadi Rodwan. Good to have you on the show, Bethany. How are you doing today? I'm good. Thanks for having me here. Amazing. Thank you very much for joining the podcast. I'll do a short and brief introduction about Bethany Stakenfeld, which is the co-founder of SendSpark, a technology that makes it easy for businesses to create and send personalized videos to strengthen their relationship with customers at every. stage you founded the company back in 2019, early 2019 with your co-founder Brandon Eskelen. And amazingly, I came across it while figuring out how can I make my message to investors very personalized. So tell me Bethany, if I'm sending a personalized message to the investor, because I want to raise, let's say around, how can I use SenseSpark? What's your superpower? Oh, yeah. Well, the cool thing about SenSpark is that we help you make personalized videos at scale. So there's a lot of video platforms you can use just to record a video of yourself, your screen, both together. And you can, of course, do that with SenSpark. But the key thing is you can take one video and then automatically personalize it for each of your recipients. So if you're reaching out to investors, like let's say you have a nice list of investors who all focus on, you know, then you can make one video that's relevant to everyone on the list. And then you can just add their first name or like other contact information automatically with AI. So it's gonna save you hours compared to recording unique videos for every person, which you might wanna do if you wanna make them feel like special. So that's our magic is like, how do we help you personalize what needs to be personalized but then automate everything else because you're a founder, you're really busy and have a lot on your plate. Yeah. So if I'm sending like a hundred messages to a hundred investors, when I'm speaking in the video, how does the name get pronounced? For example, is it AI based or I'd have to record at least one section that's personalized and then I patch things together? We actually support both. So we do support custom intro. So if you wanted to like actually record introductions for each person, you could do that. I would actually recommend doing that with your investor follow ups. Like I did that a ton when we were fundraising where you maybe have one video on like your market or your competition and then you can record an intro that's like, hey investor, you had some questions about how this is going to be really big. Well, this is how we think about the market size and stitch them together. So that's a feature. But what I was talking about is straight up AI. And that's just replacing the first name or, you know, a different contact variable. And with that, it's really cool. We're cloning your actual voice. And so like your specific accent is going to be picked up in their name. Um, which is really interesting when you're reaching out to people of like different ethnicities, because you're not like, you know, perfectly pronouncing their name in Spanish or German or whatever language you're using your own accent. So I'm like, great. My AI version is butchering their name as much in Spanish as I would if I were saying it myself. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. A follow up question on this, if I'm using SendSpark today, why video, not email? And how can we optimize the delivery? Because at the end of the day, I still need to send an email where the intended user might not open it and the video gets, you know, that doesn't do the conversion that it's supposed to do. How have you figured the pain point around this? Yeah. I mean, we take every step to optimize the videos for deliverability because with SendSpark. That's the goal. We believe you're sending them an email. You could also send them in LinkedIn or text other channels, but we build for email. So we're optimizing the video. You're not sending an actual video file. We're converting it into a nice little email preview. So you'll get good deliverability. And then one thing I would just say when doing, whether it's investor prospecting or customer outreach or anything at scale, like your contact data might not be perfect anyway. And that's another reason why I'd say you should do the personalized videos at scale with AI versus actually recording videos for every person because like deliverability aside, like someone might've left their job or like your email data could be wrong or there could just be something flawed. And if you're actually recording a video for every person, it can be hugely inefficient. But if you're making, you know, a, a to a hundred videos or a thousand videos and you send them out and 95% of your data is good. Like that's amazing. And you don't have to be like, oh, I wasted an hour on videos that no one watched. Makes a lot of sense. Take us back to the origin story. How did you come up with this idea? Yeah, so both my co-founder and I used to work together. We actually worked at two other startups before starting SenseFark. And I was, I'm gonna say I was like running marketing, but AKA like. I was the only marketer at a 15 person team, but I was doing a lot of email outreach and automation. Email's a really great way to reach new customers because it's super cheap, super scalable. You're right in the person's inbox. So we're doing email a lot and just found that video was far more effective than text when it came to like one, like getting conversions, booking meetings, things like that. And then also just building better brand equity. people respond a lot nicer to video than email. You know, the email, they're like, stop emailing me with video. Like, even if they say no, they're like, oh, thanks so much for sending a video. This is really helpful. It's so much. So, like really fell in love with video, but just found that there was so much friction in the process of creating the videos. Like, even if everything went well and we actually had a video, it's still like, how are you sending it an email so it gets delivered? How are you tracking engagement? How are you making sure that... you're actually driving conversions. You're not just sending a video, you're booking sales calls or getting people to sign up or take action. So there was a lot of friction in that process to send it out. And then also like the human friction of I'm running marketing, but the videos are coming from the sales team. So how am I getting other people to record? It just, it was like one of those things where it worked, but we were only able to really do it for special occasions. And so, you know, I'm thinking, and I'm with my, then, now co-founder, who's a designer, like how do we take video and make it not just for special occasions and make it work for everything? And then we get those, we get those conversions there at the whole funnel. And so we took a step back and built SendSpark to be kind of a hybrid between your big yard loom video platform versus your HubSpot outreach like email marketing platform. So it's the same idea where you can take a video but then you can make parts of it dynamic. And just, you know, in general, we're trying to fill all the friction to make video really usable, scalable, and effective, uh, for sales marketing and then fundraising, because fundraising is basically a B2B sale. Yeah. It makes a lot of sense. And I mean, earlier, how did you decide which features to use as an MVP and then prove that there's product market fit? Is there a specific framework that you utilize to make such decisions? Yeah. The framework that I use is. I'm blanking on what it's called, but it's like the, it's like something hypothesis testing. It's like risk hypothesis testing. I mean, what do they do? Let's call it, but basically the idea is you identify the riskiest part of your business and then you seek to validate that very quickly. So like for us, think like what's risky? Okay, risky is people don't wanna make videos or like videos don't, like a big assumption of our business is that video converts better than. And so that's something that you have to prove as soon as possible. Because the last thing you want to do is spend five years, 10 years building company and then be like, wait, actually, text was better the whole time. Like that'd be a problem. So the framework uses, you identify the riskiest part of the business and then you seek to validate that as quickly as possible. So for us, I remember validating, that was the first one. Does video work better than text? We got our friend. Ron Davis, he's a sales guy, worked at MailGuard at the time. And we just got him to make some videos and send them out. And we're like, all right, he's getting more better replies on his videos. And that was just face recording, and even have screen recording and things like that. But we still do that today. Obviously, I forgot the framework. So I'm not as rigorous about it, but that's just the way we think of everything. Hey, what's the risk and how do we validate that? And then if We failed to validate it, pivoted and do something else. How did you decide when to leave your job? What was the pivotal point that allowed you to say, you know what, this is a business that definitely has legs? Yeah, I mean, it's a great question, but the truth is, I was actually laid off. And I saw the writing on the wall a bit. And so, I was living in Minnesota, which it was way too cold for me. I'm a warm person. So I was already planning to leave and I actually had a job offer from another company in New York where I grew up. And so I was thinking, basically my question was like, I knew I was going to leave, like that ended. But the question was, do I take a nice cushy job in New York or do I go back to Texas and start a company with my, you know, coworker who's a great friend? And what I did is I did a week in New York. let my parents and people there convince me, met the team in person, et cetera. And then I spent a week in Texas, and then I was like, you know what? Life is risky, I'm gonna take a risk. And the funny thing is actually the company, the Nice Cushy Job, it was a much further along start-up. They actually shut down last week. And so I'm like, my risky, the risk I took was actually maybe the safer option. And the funny thing I'll say is when I was making that choice, everyone was like, dude, take the job. Startups are risky, it's hard, like, who knows what's gonna work out. Everyone told me to take the job, but as soon as I was like, you know what, I'm gonna do the startup and if it works, even if it fails, worst case I take a job in six months, as soon as I made that decision, it was the opposite. Everyone who was like, you sure? Was like, all right, how can we support you? So I think that there's a level of like, it's a cliff and you got to jump off it and just trust that the wings are gonna appear when you jump. But I think they did. And I've, I've heard that from other people too, that like. If you can just make a leap, you'll be able to buy. Exactly. So you've built the first maybe version of your product. How did you market it? How did you reach your early customers? I mean, early is really more direct sales of just like going, kind of even asking friends to just use it, kind of get those case studies and then find more people like them, because you don't really want too many people trying the early version. Because keep in mind, there's going to be a lot of bugs, you're missing a lot of features. You're kind of still testing the risks versus selling a real product. So people always say, oh, just ship it, put it out there. But I think you do have to be careful of who do you want to see the product in the current state? And then who do you want the next state? And at the beginning, you want to find the early adopters. And the people who are your early customers might not be your customers in year two, year four, year six. unless they're also growing and evolving the same way you are. So what we did is, yeah, we just went, we kind of begged our friends to try it out. We literally went to people's offices, watched them sign up on board. We're able to kind of fix the bugs and get things out. But it was very, it was very manual at first. And I think that's good because I don't think we would have wanted like the big influencers. the cool people, the big companies to see the product in the early stages. Like it's a lot better now than it was four years ago. Great. And was it free at the beginning or did you have like a freemium model? What was your pricing strategy early on? It's tough. I mean, people tell you don't make it free, ever. Cause the problem with free is you get people who don't value it. So it's, it's kind of tough because you're, you're out there basically being like please try this, I wanna get a real use case so I can get more customers. And then the person you're talking to is like, well, it should be free, like you're literally using my time to test. But the problem is, if you make it free, you're not like qualifying that it's really your ideal customer persona. And then like, let's say it's not really a good fit, they don't have the actual problem you're trying to solve, they're just using it because it's free. Now... you're building based on their feedback, but their feedback is leading you in the wrong direction. So I think it's tough, because you kind of feel like it should be free, because you're getting so much out of the relationship, but you just can't. Like you have to say no and find, you know, we're talking about a hundred customers, but when it comes to your first 10, it can't be free. It's better to have 10 people that really have a problem are willing to pay for you to solve it for them, than to have a hundred free users. Makes a lot of sense, this approach. So you've exhausted the friends and family. What was the next channel you went after? Yeah, so we, what do we do? So friends, family. And then, I mean, then the thing is like, once you have a couple, like case studies, then you find more people like them. So like, you know, early on, like, let's say we had like five people that were companies. A previous company in San Antonio, we shared an office with other startups. So like those were the first people went out to, we're like, all right, like we, I'm like, we knew them, we knew their business really well and we could help them. But then once we had like the good success use cases, then what we could do is make case studies and then you can reach out to other people like them. And we're still doing stuff. I'm going to say in network. So it's not like our friends, but you know, we could ask someone, hey, it looks like you're connected with X person. You know, we just helped Y person at a similar company achieve. these results, could you make an intro? So it was still very network driven early on because we're like, and even now, I mean, a lot of, we just got set up to do like partner marketing, things like that. Like asking for warm intro, it does scale. And you can get warm intros and then you have good case studies and then you're just kind of repeating the process. And like, I think it's important to identify like that process early, like who's your customer? what's like the use case and then what are the expected results? And then that's kind of a flywheel that you can keep using. And then you're just adding more marketing to increase demand and accelerate things, but that's the core. Amazing. How did your sales philosophy change between maybe the first zero to thousand and now you have 50,000 users. So probably the way you approach acquisition has, has changed. Walk us through your philosophy. So I'm going to tell you my philosophy and you people will have a different one. but I'm going to tell you how I think about it. And I'm not like, oh, this is the only thing that's right, but this is how I think about it. I like smaller companies as customers who the user, the buyer is the user, and can make decisions very quickly. And I think as a startup, it's important that you're able to talk to someone, like identify if there's a real need, if they'll use it, and then get them set up and have them going and have that cycle be very fast. Other people that I respect a lot, say the opposite, they like the longer sales cycles, you get more, you can get bigger contracts, longer contracts, right, annual three years where we're like, yeah, let's get you up and running within a week. Like, that's how I like to do things. I think you learn a lot. We don't require contracts, so people can cancel anytime. And we just say turning is learning. Like we want to get that information. Sure, it sucks when people cancel, but like, at least we're able to learn and get that information really quickly versus postponing that a year. when their contract's up and delaying the sales cycle. So I'd say like everything we're doing now and have been doing is designed to be very fast, fast learning, fast implementation, fast feedback. It's also a better customer experience. Like people like to be able to just try something, do it. They don't like it canceled. It gives our customers a lot more flexibility. But I wouldn't say that's the only approach. It's just, I think you have to commit to one and be like, no, we're gonna be fast. And like. doing fast or we're going to be bigger and slower and more intentional about who you work with. And I think it can depend a bit on like your product, your industry, how your buyers like to buy. Amazing. What has it been the biggest challenge in scaling up? I mean, the biggest challenge like depends on the day. I think that there's a level of we've done, like, I think it's just knowing like when to, when to give people time versus when to automate. Like with our product, we do try to do as much of it possible self-service. And I like giving people the flexibility, but that also means that like we can't give everyone like super personalized attention. So it's kind of figuring out where to draw that line. Like, you know, how much freedom do we want to give our users versus how much do we want to help them and control the process. And that evolves as the product evolves. And I think we err on the side of like letting people just kind of go in, try things out, make their own mistakes with video. But sometimes I'm like, oh, maybe we should try to. you know, give them more linear paths and, and kind of set things up to be more, um, formulated for them. Amazing. Were there any crucible or one crucible moment in your journey that could have gone the other way around? I know the life of an entrepreneur has peaks and troughs. I mean, definitely some, there's definitely been some lucky breaks. I would say, especially early on, like very early in the company, it's a total chicken and egg game. because you're like, okay, well, I don't have a product to sell, so I can't get revenue. I don't have money because I don't have a product to sell to hire engineers or salespeople or things like that. And investors don't want to invest because I don't have a product or revenue. And so it's like, think about that. It's like, how are you going to get one without the other? So I just call it the startup wiggle. You're just kind of like... wiggle a little here to be like, OK, we got some proof of interest. Now we can get a little funding so we can build a little. And you're just constantly like trying to stay alive and keep building and getting momentum. So early on, it was super tough. I mean, once things start working, everything gets easier because like you're able to sell more and generate more revenue and then, you know, pay. And it's like, you know, an amazing flywheel. But early on, it's so hard to get that off the ground. And I think I remember like working from home in San Antonio, we're like interview, like we just started, right? So we're interviewing all these accelerators. And we're doing a call with tech stars. And like my house, like I had like three roommates. So I'm doing the call outside because they're all on the phone doing their jobs. And I'm like outside and like a train goes by. And in San Antonio, like the trains are really loud and they also stay forever. It's like the longest train you can imagine. And I'm outside like trying to like... wow, these tech stars and masters and the train's going crazy and they're like, we can't hear you. And I'm like, we're not gonna get in. So anyway, we did not get in. We did 500 startups. But it was like, it's like, how are you going to make it work? Like, and at that point, like, yeah, we had just like a couple months. I mean, we're super early. So like a couple months when you're early is like better than anything, I guess. But absolutely. What's the principle that you live by that has served you well on your journey? I don't think there's one principle. I'd say it's really just about enjoying the ride a bit. The highs are high, the lows are low, and you have to know, all right, it feels low now, but later today, something good's going to happen and just trust the process a little bit. I think one thing I'll put with that is just be really nice to people. I think... And this isn't like a startup thing. Like in life, there's like an urge to like, when you're frustrated, be mean to other people, but the problem is the startup, like you're frustrated so much. And like your people are your ride and die crew. Like you can't be mean to them. So I think it's just like, you got to know like, Hey, this is going to change. But above all, like be respectful to the people on the team because they also are probably feeling low right now if like a customer turn or something bad happened. Well, last I want to do is like add to it. So I just try to like really treat people with respect. And if I'm mad, like, go away from my computer so I don't like say anything I regret. And then when you come back with fresh eyes, you're like, no, like, they're freaking great anyway. So I just try to like distance myself and be nice to people and enjoy the ride. It's just a simple principle, be nice to people. One last question, Bethany, what's next for SandSpark? Yeah, I mean, we're really, really excited about what we're building now. We're adding a lot with... A lot with AI personalization, like our goal has always been, how do we help you personalize? We need to be personalized. Like that's the beauty of video. And then automate everything else. You're not like repeating yourself, doing redundant work, or just wasting time. Like you have to really, as a founder, as a salesperson, as a market, whatever you do, like you have to know where to really prioritize and then what you can automate. So we're adding a ton in. We're really pumped about like we have the AI personalization and the voice now. We're adding more to make different dynamic videos for different things. Like our goal is that, you know, when you're sending out videos, when you're communicating with your customers, every video that they get is personalized for them in some way that just makes them feel special and makes them love your brand. So I couldn't be more excited. Amazing, amazing. These are all great things. We'll put the link to your website in the show notes. Are you hiring and how can people reach you? We're not hiring at the moment, but I'm always down to connect with people. We should be hiring later this year. People can email me, my email is bethany at sensbark.com and I'm pretty active on LinkedIn too, so follow me. I think I'm the only Bethany Stackinfeld out there, but yeah, shoot me a connection request and let's stay in touch. Bethany, we wish you the best of luck on your journey and hopefully you bring hundreds and thousands of users to your technology. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to the first 100. We hope it inspired you in your journey. If you're enjoying the podcast, please subscribe to our podcast on Apple iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, or Spotify, and share it with a friend starting their entrepreneurship journey. Leave us a five-star review. Your support will help spread our podcast to more viewers.