 Great intro. Hi, everyone. So great to be here at Slush. Thank you for being here as well. We're going to talk today about the journey from your product insight, your idea, all the way to your first customer. And whether you have that insight in a lab and a research environment, like Samuel just talked about with that great presentation, or you found it in the field or as an operator or anywhere else, we're going to talk about that journey. I'm Lindsay Scrace, the chief revenue officer at Checker. Maybe by show of hands, has anyone heard of Checker in the audience? All right, I see some hands. Fantastic. For those of you who don't know Checker, we are a series E, HR tech company, focusing on disrupting the background check in screening space. That was our first act, doing other things since then. At Checker, we're focused on doing that in two ways. So one is through our technology and our APIs. Think faster, more accurate screenings without compromising accuracy and quality. We're also looking at how do we do this in a more fair way. So typical background checks and screens, they screen people out of the workforce. Checker, we're working to screen people in in a safe, thoughtful, and compliant way. One in three US Americans has an arrest or conviction record. One in three of the adult population. So we're working to thoughtfully, safely, and compliantly also find those people jobs. So we'll talk through the journey today. Checker now has tens and tens of thousands of customers, but it started with one, and we'll go through it. I'm sure you're acutely aware that getting your first customer is such a pivotal moment for you as founders, as startups. And it's that moment where you could take a kind of exhale, you put a ton of work, risk, and time into this, and you've got someone in the door. It also is an incredible opportunity because these early customers, they can become your board of advisors. They have skin in the game, and they have a vested interest in your success as a company. And they can help give you insight into product development, into what value is resonating, and how to position as you scale. It's also cash in the door, which obviously is important. So I'm going to talk through three key themes today. The first one is translating your customer, your insights into customer value. This is about taking your idea, your product, and making sure that that adds value for your potential customers. And this is an important reframe from saying, how do I find customers or users for my product to how do I find the right solution and value for my potential customers? This is a really important reframe that you need to take on this journey. And our founders, these are Jonathan and Daniel, two co-founders of Checker. They found their insight in 2014. There were two French guys living in the US working for a delivery startup called Deliv in Silicon Valley. And as you know, back then, this was the rise of the gig economy, the on-demand economy, where finding the supply side, the earners, the workers, the drivers, the delivery folks, is just as important as finding the customers and the users. And the matching of that supply and demand is critical to the success of the company. And they were facing a problem. They could not onboard workers fast enough. And one of the key blockers in doing this was the pre-higher screenings, the background checks, that are a critical step in that process. And big engineers, they said, there's got to be a better way. There's got to be a way to get people to work faster without compromising quality, without compromising compliance. And so that led to their insight and the development of Checker and the first background check API. But you can't just have an insight. You have to make sure you understand the customer's pain and the value. So what is their best alternative? If there isn't an alternative today, why does someone need this? Or if there are incumbents, what are you doing that's providing more value and what's better for them? And Jonathan and Daniel, so they had this idea. They said, we need to talk to a lot of other customers and try to understand, is this a pain point for them as well? So they talked to a lot of gig companies. And they validated their idea. They improved upon the idea. And they learned, hey, this is a really acute pain point for scaling the gig economy. And that gave them that validation. That gave them additional insight to take it forward. And in doing this, you need to be truly curious about the customer and the value you're providing. What is in it for them? And how do you do this? You talk to as many customers as possible. You ask them open-ended questions. You're not pitching your product. You're trying to understand their perspective and the value that you could potentially bring. Prior to Checker, I spent a decade in Google Cloud, where I ultimately ran our mid-market startups, SMB business for G Suite, Google Workspace now branded, and Google Cloud Platform. And in the early days, we were primarily just selling email or collaboration tools. And we saw that there was a much better way to do this. People were sending files, attachments, back and forth. I don't know. I'm dating myself. I don't know if any of you remember this time. But I would open my email in the morning and wait for it to load. I'd get an inbox full message, delete attachments, version control, saving version of a PowerPoint 27.5, like a full-time job. There's a better way of doing this. And we had conviction in that. But customers had hesitation. And we needed to really understand, OK, so we've got this idea, what are the concerns and how do we get a better understanding of where they are? So we dug in and we talked to customers. There was very real concerns on change management. You're changing not only the way things work in the IT team, but of the entire company, the way every single individual works. So change management was real. Beyond this, there were product gaps. I remember pitching for things to our product team, like, can we please have the ability for customers to put page numbers in their slides or in their documents? Little things, but they were very real and very important to customers. And so we listened, we learned, we adapted. We built out the product gaps. We worked on the positioning, and we made sure we addressed the very real change management at hand. This is the important thing you have to learn and adapt as you go. The second theme is being focused and tenacious in your customer acquisition. So once you have clear insight into your product market fit, you know your value. You've done deep discovery. How do you go out and find those first customers? And the answer is that there's no one-size-fits-all approach here. It's going to depend on your go-to-market, your ideal customer profile, and how you're going about customer acquisition. But what I can say is that no matter what your strategy is, it's really important at the beginning to be very focused. If you're going after everything, you're going after nothing. You really need to start smartly. And I've advised early-stage companies who are going after maybe six or seven different countries or markets at once. And they don't even have traction yet in the first. You're going after every single segment when you still haven't figured out the perfect fit and strategy for one. If you're doing that, you're deluding focus. You're spreading your team too thin. And you're also missing out on a really critical learning loop. In those early days of customer acquisition, you have to continuously get feedback, learn, and adapt as you go. You're also burning a lot of cash if you're doing that. So your investors want to increase your TAM. You want to increase your SAM. Everyone wants to do that. But the key is just being smart. So think about what geography are you going after? And make sure, I guess it goes without saying that you have the right people on the ground there, that you're on the ground there. Think about what segmentation? If you're B2B, is it enterprise, mid-market, SMB? There's an ideal often to try to do all those at once, but it's very hard. Or if you're a consumer, what are your demographics? What's your ideal customer type? And then from a vertical and industry perspective, really think about which industry you're starting in. And in prioritizing these things, the key is to think about where are you adding value most quickly and most immediately for the customers? And then also, where are you going to learn the most quickly as it relates to your ideal customer? And at Checker, we knew pretty early on that there was appetite for this way beyond gig. But we started narrowly with gig companies in the US only. And since then, we've expanded to every segment across every vertical, but we started with a narrow focus. Same in Google Cloud. We saw for G Suite Google Workspace that there was a lot of appetite and interest from startups, like many of you, who were looking at new ways of collaboration and productivity tools, and then moved on from there. Same with GCP, a lot of interest from tech-focused companies, digital natives, who were using more advanced AI and analytics tools where we did have a clear advantage. But in both of these, we started narrow and then expanded from there. In terms of how to go about your go-to-market and your customer acquisition strategies, there are so many channels to do this, from one side narrow and more network referrals, all the way to broad-based ads and spending money on search. And you will probably use all of these at some point, but there's so many ways to pour more money into this. You can always spend more. This is someone coming from Google where you can always spend more on Google Ads, for example. But the key is you've got to be smart and you have to be focused in the beginning. Gone are the days of growth at all costs. They were great. They're not here anymore, and maybe they'll be back, but not any time in the near future. And so really thinking about how do you start in a focused way and then data-driven add-on from there? So I'll talk about a couple of these. One is your network. This goes without saying. I'm sure you all know it, but worth repeating. Most of your early customers, especially if you're B2B, will come from your own network, and you have to use it. Be bold and be tenacious in asking for help. But you have to make it easy for them. I get a lot of vague requests for help. Can you help spread the word? But really put it out in an easy way. Help them help you. So here are the companies I'm going after. Here are the lists of contacts that I see you're connected with. Here's other contacts. Do you know anyone connected with them? Here's the email template I'd like you to send. Here's a one-pager describing my solution and the value. Or here's a social post. Can you amplify it? But really, I mean, everyone wants to help, but everyone else is incredibly busy as well. So tee it up, and that will increase your chances of success tremendously. Checker got our first customer through our founders network. Daniel was introduced to the co-founders of DoorDash. See Tony on the slide here who's speaking tomorrow. Definitely check out his talk. He's amazing. But Daniel knew the first employee there. They used the network, Ask for Help, Ask for an intro, and found out DoorDash was facing a very real challenge in scaling and getting people onboarded as quickly as possible. So it was a very strong fit. And from there, that opened the door to the next gig company and the next one from there. That first introduction and leveraging the network was pivotal. Outbound prospecting is another key way to drive growth. You've done the homework. You know your ICP. You know your target customers. Go after them directly. And now, more than ever, there are so many tools at your disposal from data, contacts, outbound outreach tooling to do this well. So use it. A few things on this, though. First of all, do it yourself. Don't hire people to do this for you, especially in the early days. You don't yet know what's landing and resonating. You know your product better than anyone else, so you as a founder should be doing this outreach. Second is make it personalized. It's getting very spammy. Everyone's doing this. Inboxes are flooded with a lot of different messaging that's very similar. So figure out, do your homework, do your research, and how to differentiate your messaging and make it really personalized to the recipients. Those I get that are more personalized, 10 times more likely to open the message and respond. And then be tenacious. Often these deal cycles can take six to 12 months. And you have to really push hard. Multi-touch strategies. Our CEO founder was doing the outbounding at Checker himself, and we had a target customer on our list. He reached out to them, I think, seven or so times in a multi-touch cadence over several weeks. No response. Month later, no response. Five months later, the customer reaches back out and says, hey, sorry, I've been very busy. I saw your name somewhere else. I'm interested in chatting. We acquire this customer and they're one of our most important customers to this day. So you have to plant a lot of seeds and know that it will take time to cultivate. And then there's a lot of other channels you can layer on from there, to increase awareness of your company in your key target markets. So partnerships are a really great way for brand awareness, also for customer acquisition. But you have to be very targeted here. You could spend a lot of time building partnership networks, building integrations. Focus on where there's very strong overlap in terms of the customer profile you're targeting. Events are also a really great way. Events are back post-COVID, which is fantastic. You're here at an event, which is a great step. And these are great ways you gotta be focused. So at Checker, there were two gig conferences that existed and those are the two events that we went to and that was it. And even if you don't have money to spend on a presence or one of these really nice booths, going to the event can be a high ROI activity. Couple it with your outbound strategy, get the list of attendees, and arrange meetups around the event. Really great catalyst. People are stepping away from their day to day and they have time to meet. I see a lot of folks are doing this already at Slush and it's a great opportunity. PR is another area that I would not recommend investing in at an early stage, but you wanna be aware and look out for opportunities to get some visibility for your company. This can be great at fundraising moments, new product launches. Your investor network is a great way to tap into to make this happen. And Checker, in the early days, we got a piece in TechCrunch about our innovation, which was a great awareness to a target market. We got inbound leads starting to come in from this. One of those leads was from Uber, who was a target account that maybe we'd get someday in the future, but they reached inbound after seeing this article. So this can be opportunistically applied, but again, don't invest in a PR machine, obviously in the early stage. And then once you acquire these customers, it is absolutely critical that you can reference them. You spend a lot of time acquiring them and you need to use their names as you expand further. Gives validation, social proof, and it can be really hard when you're signing that first customer or customers to then ask for something else from them, but do it. It is absolutely critical and you'd even be willing to negotiate it away something else to get that. In Google Cloud, as we went into new markets, we'd work to make sure we landed a marquee customer and then did a lot of press around it. So they weren't even not just a reference for individual customers, but there was a halo effect and customers thought, hey, if Airbus or Deutsche Bank or Home Depot, they're doing their research and homework. Maybe I should consider it too. And at Checker, when we were expanding into Gig, having the ability to reference customers like Uber, DoorDash, Grubhub, Instacart, this was critical in being able to expand further into the next 50, 100 gig companies. And then as we expanded into new industries and verticals from there, having key logos across each industry was incredibly important and was an amplifier to our sales process. So get the referenceable customers and then make sure you incorporate those into your sales process. All right, the last theme is one that I really like because you've got the customers in the door and it's more in your control, is manifesting customer success. And it's expensive to acquire these early customer views, spent a lot of time, blood, sweat, and tears to do so. And it is absolutely critical that you make sure that not only are they successful, but they are advocates for you and your product and your company. And to do this, you may need to do things that are completely unscalable in those early days. You may need to do things that you would never do for another customer and you know or not repeatable. And that is totally okay. And this might look like much deeper customer success or customer support engagement. It might look like custom product development with and for the customer. And it will certainly look like much deeper engagement from you and from your teams in the beginning. And this will be a differentiator, especially if you're going against existing incumbents. And at Checker, we had an early customer who we acquired and brought on. And in the onboarding, there were doubts. They were concerns or product gaps. And so our co-founders set up time with them twice a week for several weeks. And in those meetings, they would get an intake and they would hear what are the concerns, what are the gaps. That night, they would go build the code and then the next day, ship it. And they did that week after week until that customer had conviction and that customer went from being skeptical and potentially having reservations to leave to a very fierce advocate who then went on to start other companies and continued to use Checker from there. So customers will remember this. And you may not be able to do it for all customers, but you can certainly do it for your first customers. You also need a path to scale. On the product side, you can't be building custom code for every single customer you onboard. On the engagement side, you certainly can't have bi-weekly syncs with every customer as you get more. So figure out a way to make sure that in building products, you're taking on this early feedback, you're building it in to your platform in a way that's scalable. Where you're not doing custom things that don't fit from an architectural perspective. And from customer engagement, make sure you have a way to continue to get feedback as you grow and as you scale. Whether that's from surveys, in product, customer engagement, make sure that learning loop doesn't stop, it just happens in a more scalable, reputable fashion. And then take all that magic, that personalized engagement and build it into your product in a more self-serve way. And in fact, I think self-service is often something that's built out too late for many companies. Huge opportunity and growth lover. In the early days of Google Cloud, we were selling email and collaboration tools. I set up a team and the whole goal of this team, it was embedded in the signup experience for the product. And the whole goal of the team was to answer the phone. We encouraged customers to call us as they were starting, answer the phone and get them sold, get them onboarded and activated and using it right away on that first phone call. We had team across the entire globe, 24-7, ability to talk to customers. And we knew we had a stated objective that the goal of our team was not only to delight the customers, but to work ourselves out of a job, to make the experience so good and to take the feedback from the customers, build it into the product with our product teams, such that customers didn't need to pick up the phone. And we did just that. And I can think of dozens of other examples where you master the craft on your own or maybe in a subscale way or engage in a subscale way. With the knowledge that that's not going to continue, you have to have a path out of it. Just know that it's okay in those early days to do that. All right, so this whole process is absolutely a journey. And if you're, you know, you've done the homework, you have your value, that's the most important thing. And you know the value you're bringing to these customers. And it's important that you remember and hold on to that because that will be tested as you go through this process of customer acquisition. If you're data-driven like I am, you know the numbers and you know that the vast majority of customer interactions, prospect interactions you have early on or outreaches will not get to a yes. They may not tell you no, but you won't get a lot of yeses early on. And so it's really important as you get out of those meetings where you're like, if only this customer would see the light, then you know, I'd have a great opportunity here or you might start to question the product market fit. It's really important that you maintain your confidence and your optimism because that shines through in every customer you're speaking with. If you lose that, then things start to get shaky. So as you're going on this, make sure you think about that person. Maybe think about right now, who's that person? Who's gonna be your cheerleader? Who's gonna build you up when you have those moments where you're getting a lot of no's or you're not getting to a yes yet? And think about that. It might be a family member, it might be your co-founder, it might be an investor, someone on your team, your partner, but let them know proactively that you will have those moments where you don't need to dissect the problem or look at the data, you just need someone to cheer you on and give you that dose of motivation and confidence because it will shine through. And if you're confident, if you know your value and you've done the homework to make sure the value is there and you're tenacious and focused, it will pay off in one way or another. So I am Lindsay Scraze, thank you so much for spending time with me today. I have such deep respect for the journey that you were on. Enjoy the rest of that journey, enjoy slush and thank you.