Yoni Tserruya, CEO of Lusha | How to Build the Best Product (and Bootstrap Your Company)

Welcome back to another episode of the success story podcast. Today I have the founder of Lusha Yoni Cejouya. He is a serial entrepreneur and he is built Lusha from the ground up, originally bootstrapped and now venture backed. Lusha is probably one of the most disruptive technologies in terms of business to business sales. What does it do? It helps you find the contact information of literally anybody. So if you have a name on the internet, you can find their phone number and their email address. Obviously you can see how powerful that could be for salespeople. It is one numerous awards. It is one of the fastest growing software's of 2020. And it's also received the top 100 best software companies by the very notable G2. Yoni just raised around a funding but he did build this from the ground up and we're going to speak about how he focuses on product-led growth and what that means, why it matters to focus on building the best possible product you can and that's how you win the market. We're also very fortunate to be sponsored again today by Gusto. Gusto is your one stop shop for all payroll solutions for small business owners, large business owners or entrepreneurs. So if you want to get rid of some of the headache of the day-to-day, perhaps admit items that you just don't want to deal with as a business owner, definitely stick around till around halfway in this show and Gusto has a special offer for you. So further ado, another episode of the Success Storypop. Have all my notes here too. All right, I think we're recording. I think we're all good. All right, thanks again for joining me. Today I am sitting down with Yoni Zeruya, the CEO and co-founder of Lucia. Yoni has an incredible career coming from AT&T. So he's worked in Telco as a developer. He was the founder of YAPS and now of course, a serial entrepreneur growing and scaling. Lucia is very successfully. What is Lucia? Well, I'm going to let Yoni speak to it. But a couple notable points. It was named the top 100 G2 best software company. So it was rated by G2. It was also rated one of the fastest growing products in 2020. It's all focused on B2B customer insights and data points. But then Yoni is the Yoni's the expert. So I'm going to let him go into it. But Yoni, thank you for sitting down. I'm excited too. I've used it. I've tried it with my own team. I apparently was pronouncing it incorrectly for the every time I trained anybody on it. But that's okay. So I know the product and I'm excited to sit down with you and unpack your journey and figure out what you're trying to do and how you've done it successfully with Lucia. So thanks you. Great. So thanks for having me. Thanks for the warm word. Yeah, so I can talk about first about Lucia and what are we doing and then we discuss about the journey. So Lucia is a crowdsource B2B data company which helps salespeople and marketing people find their next customer. We do it by providing them accurate business data and inside about technologies and the buyers so they can easily identify and connect with their ideal profile. And our goal and the main advantage of Lucia is to build the largest salespeople community in the world so that the more salespeople are using the product, the better the data become because the salespeople help us to validate the data and provide the best B2B data quality in the world to help company grow. So it's a good product. I've used it myself and actually that's why I was so excited when I think some of the energy will be shared. I'm like, oh yes, you know it's I speak to founders all day but when you speak to a founder of a product you've actually used. It's even more exciting because you actually know how it works and how well it works. But let's let's break down your journey first. So we can understand where you came from how you got to where you are today and then also most most curiously for me why you decided to build another B2B data sales and marketing product and probably one of the I'm sure like one of the most competitive industries oversaturated industries and everyone is trying to do similar things in the same space. So anyways go ahead tell me tell me your story where did you come from? Yeah so first I know I'm 36 years old, I have three-liter kids. I graduated as a software engineer in 2011 and the very first years of my career was building mobile applications which are mainly focus on user experience, sleek UI, mainly B2C and as a side effect I also learned about data and how to you know cleaning up data and just play with the data work but nothing with it from it was related to B2B in general and in 2016 I made my ASAP which is my co-founder in Lucia and when I met him he honestly only wanted data from me he just looked for someone who can buy data from and then someone introduced us but I met him and I didn't want to sell anything but I met him and then he told me you know you can you can build this an extension over the web to provide business contact details and each one of us you know went to his home and after two weeks I spoke with him again and told him hey you know I didn't stop thinking about this idea and he said you know what I didn't stop thinking about it as well and then we said okay so let's do it together because I knew I mean I have a lot of experience of how to build technology and products but I didn't know the B2B at all and his experience was exactly from the B2B and business area so the way we started to work together was beautiful because we just completed each other very very quickly and and for the question I mean why did we decided to go to this industry everything happened bottom up we didn't you know thought about it that we will get to where we are today we just saw a problem back then in 2016 and we thought that we can provide a really simple and an easy solution to the market and so we just started to develop it and the first version we developed it I think in two months we released it to the world and and everything was so slow you know searches search contact details took like eight seconds sometimes 100 seconds in average but we just released it to see what going on and we released it many two recruiters at the beginning a sub background was from the recruiting and head hunting world so we knew that they need that and that's what the main target audience but very quickly sells people and you know encountered with the product and saw the benefit of it for their needs and started to use it as well and so everything was just growing bottom up organically since then today our main focus is only sales mainly sales and marketing recruiting we are serving them as well but it's not the main roadmap for our product currently and and the beautiful part with that you know in it will show you five years old and I think the first four and a half years we did it as bootstrap company and and everything you know just built organically bottom up because we listened to the customers and just saw what they need and this is going to this is going to dovetail very nicely into you know we're chatting before we started hit you know before I hit record and we're like where do you want to take this podcast and you said a lot about let's try to have a product led growth and and what does that mean and why does that allow you to be successful and it's an interesting point and I think that going into this market because there are a lot of solutions that do similar if you try and compete with these fully developed products day one especially if you're bootstrap you're probably going you're probably not going to do so well right so you have to you have to grow with you know multiple iterations so um describe to me through through Lucia like what what is product led growth what does that mean and how did how did Lucia sort of adopt that strategy and and also why why did you know that that was a strategy that you should take what how did you know that beautiful part is that we didn't know at the beginning to get it to an honest answer yeah yeah I mean as you understood my my background was B2C product so when we thought about building the product my intuition was okay so let's build something simple which anyone can start using for free and if you want to buy you can upgrade premium because this is what I know from I knew from mobile world I didn't know that it is so so rare in the B2B world back then after several years when we well you know after three years I think we we learned that there is there is a name for that which means product that grows and we suddenly did that without even thinking um but I think the the benefits of product led growth is exactly what we thought we just didn't know how to save product growth that and and the idea is that when you I mean if you're not doing product led your classic B2B company it means that once a visitor goes to a marketing website and he reads the you know the value proposition let's say he understand that because in a lot of cases he just don't understand and then you want to use it what you see is that you have a form which you need to fill up the form and then schedule a demo and today and I as a consumer but I think 75% of the people today doesn't want to talk to a sales rep before they know the product they want to talk to someone after they know the product and when they have questions so the idea of product let's grow is that just open the follow let the user try before he buy let him even buy but only if you need scale and only if you need or have any question he will go to the sales team and so what what product that is doing is that the product is out there anyone can use it you go to a marketing website you can sign up for free you can start using it for free you can even buy itself service you don't need to talk to anyone and if you need to talk you can do that and I think at the beginning a lot of sales people even those we hire here in Lucia you know they don't use to they use to talk to everyone they want to they want to manage the sales cycle and and and the idea is that when you when the sales team manages the sales cycle you might bring bigger deals at the beginning but you're not bringing or you it's very hard to create a big brand awareness without many marketing resources because the funnel is is closed by a rep and you need a lot of reps to talk to a lot of people to tell them the value and when you do product led you actually put the product out there anyone can use it you create brand awareness by the product I mean if the product is good it just works for you and when the sales people just talk to people they are actually talking to users they are not talking to prospect which means it doesn't need to explain the value of a position the user already know the value of a position he know the product he know the service the conversation is much further than that it about how much it cost or maybe I didn't understand some feature but the the job of the sales rep is to connect the dots and just go to the sales conversation to the negotiation area much quickly then talking about barricade position so so product led grows company actually sells more and grow much faster than classic B2B companies the beginning of the journey might be different but in the long run PLG just grow faster and create you know better user experience as well and you had you were bootstrapped up until I think you've raised money I saw you raised you raised 40 million early February congratulations on that was that the first round was that you the you ever raised yeah yeah it was the first round up until then we are completely bootstrapped we reached to almost 1500 15 000 customers totally bootstrapped and and the reason we succeeded to do that was exactly because we did it product led so a lot of our customers are completely self-serve and those who need scale or want a bigger solution we sell them be ourselves team but the sales team just speak to those who want to buy you know and when you're doing product led growth you're focusing obviously focusing on the product but also you must have some sort of inbound or demand gen and if you're bootstrapped I guess somebody who's listening to this maybe wonder like okay so it's a little bit scary for me to not depend on sales people where do I invest my limited resources so that people even know I exist and what did you do so I mean what we did at the beginning we just tried to publish the there is a service called Lucia in you know in Facebook recruiters groups and LinkedIn recruiters groups in some websites that cover recruiters and we did it for like a week or two we also brought like several influencers in the recruiting area but mainly that's it after the very first you know push that we did to the product everything else happened organically because the product did deliver and the value was good for the people the data was good and so people start you know tell about it to other people and they're organic the word of mouth just work and and we when we had natural natural growth right but actually most of the product that grows company if you have a good product and you invest most of the resources in a good product this is what it what's happened to you have you have the word of mouth you have natural and organic growth even without marketing spend now marketing spend can definitely accelerate that but it's not that without it you're not growing you can still grow because the product is your marketing the premium is your marketing hey Scott here we're just going to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode gusto this is a one-stop shop one place you can go to take care of all the payroll issues all the payroll stresses that you have to deal with as a business owner look 2020 has been a rough year we can all agree on that in 2021 is pretty rough too but if there's one thing that small business owners don't need is more headache one thing that you've learned in the past year is that you have to focus on your business because gusto isn't just built with businesses in mind is built with the people who run businesses in mind their payroll system is the easiest to use and I've used a lot over my career gusto automatically calculates paychecks it files all of your payroll taxes it also helps with time tracking health insurance and a ton of other HR nightmares that you just don't want to deal with it also gives you access to HR experts who can help you super easy to get started and set up the switching pains are nil why because they will move over all of your data for you 94% of customers who switch to gusto recommend gusto as the best payroll solution that ever used and this is the offer you're waiting for anybody who's listening right now on the success story podcast you get three months free this means you can try it without any stress go to gusto calm slash scott that's gusto calm slash scott and that will give you three months free to try it out for yourself play around with it see if it works for your business I'm almost positive it will all right let's goodbye and a follow up on that in was there was there any it sounds like you you know I think you're going to answer this question saying like no we actually we didn't have a ton of issues but it sounds well in in this particular space it seems like there's a lot of competition so how did the way you differentiated was just having an incredible product that was that was really how you did it I think I think two things differentiate Lucia for the market firstly the data quality is the data quality at the end of the day tell about the data and we succeeded to provide very good results at the beginning of the journey so the data was good better than the better better than most of the competitors back then and the second thing is how we sell it so today even if two companies are selling the exact same thing but one company does it much more easily with no friction with self-service experience we can just and this is the PLG this is exactly what we did then then it's going to succeed faster and and because how it's sell it was much more simpler so yeah I think I think the data quality and the way of selling it that we are we we we sold to the end user to their to the AE or to the SDR the sitting in the company and you don't need to create a big deal with the procurement with $25,000 annual contract so anyone can just download and start using it so people just started yeah now makes a lot of sense and then now you've raised you raised some money so what is what is your vision for the company like where do you want to take it next because now you actually have some capital funding you so what are what are next steps for Lucia yeah so the capital is basically accelerating everything we're doing starting from headcount and and we now do have marketing budget that we are we're we're increasing because of the fun but the main division is to build the largest community of salespeople in the world because we believe that the sales industry needs to be much more data driven and and be more focused about the people that want to buy when they want to buy and and just make sure that the people are spending more time selling so instead of trying to you know spray and pray to everyone with cold calling or whatever other approach a lot of companies are doing today we want to provide them really accurate data so they won't spend time on just you know those who doesn't want to buy and try to provide the best intent and timing to do that both for sales and but also in the future for customer success as well because I think yeah no it's it's very smart and then I guess just a follow-up because you're in the industry what are what are the trends that you're seeing like the best practices in sales that if somebody's listening and they're perhaps in a more legacy organization or they're not sort of you know up to the times with with what works what do you recommend people start to do as a sales rep or as a sales leader I think what we see as trend is that more and more companies are not trying to necessarily talk to as many people as possible like I said spray and pray it's more going to be to super prospecting to be very very accurate about who you want to spend the time on and this is exactly also what what you're doing in in ABM but you just want to know who you want to run after and then work there and get deeper in the organization so you need to know who you want to reach out and I'll just spend time on a lot of customers so we see that we see the trend in sales teams going to that direction and this is what we enable and trying to to provide even better at data points we do that and one thing one thing that you did touch on I just want to sort of reinforce while we're on the topic you mentioned about getting people to spend more time actually selling like I'm sure you know even the fact that you installed you you created this initial iteration of the product as a chrome extension so that people aren't navigating to a web app or some other other application and taking them away from the prospecting it's meant to be like seamless with their workflow um speak to speak to the issues that sales reps I know you see them with spending too much time on non sales activities and how this solves for that yeah I think salespeople today spend a lot of time on admin work and identifying who they need to talk to next and you know understanding the trends in the company so the conversation will be more slick and they will know what to discuss about and and honestly what happened and this data according to source.com salespeople are actually selling 33% of their day so the rest is about admin and prioritizing and and and aggregating data so if you provide them high higher quality of data or you help them prioritize the lead based on you know some criteria like industry a number of employees or technologies or stuff like that they can spend more time selling because you actually help them with automation and data to to prioritize their work so so I think I think that the industry is going that direction how to optimize and the optimization is based on data like making a lot of other areas in the world today and then the last the last question that I sort of have some rapid fire just based on on your career. Sam a sales leader and and you're trying to sell me on lucha obviously the the magic is in the data and and how accurate it is like you said that's important from the start so how does lucha or how would any company probably you know you have experience because you're the CEO of lucha but how would lucha guarantee that their data it would be better than other companies without disclosing trade secrets of proprietary IP what what is it that you do differently. So there are two answers for that first we're not guarantee anything we we we want the customers to try before they ride so we just tell them okay so give it a shot just try you want the extra credit you want to try okay we will give you a trial we want you to be happy with what with the results and so that you will want to buy we're not trying to push anyone to a deal that he doesn't want to because I don't believe in that especially not in SaaS in SaaS you need to the user needs to want to continue and pay for what you're getting so that's that about I mean how we sell it we just want to let you try first about the data I think we're doing what any other company is doing I mean we have multiple data sources and the main thing is how to merge and identify the right data points according to the others I think the main differentiation of lucha is about the community and the size of the community and the fact that we have a lot of end users help us to build a very big community and the more people are using the platform the better the data become because it will learn the system which data is accurate in which not and the users can provide us feedback about the accuracy of the data so the data become much more accurate and that's the main challenge of this industry because people are switching jobs approximately every two years so even if you have a very good data today in a year from now third of it's going to be outdated so the challenge is how do you make sure that you are accurate as much as possible to the reality to the reward and the fact that we have a lot of people in the community just help us do that faster and provide more accurate data no that's uh it's an interesting point too that I you know I've never thought about that but especially like with with COVID with even even even with just you know general attitude towards staying in one job for a period of time everyone wants to shift everybody's always shifting for better for worse and that provides a huge challenge for for a company like yours so it makes a lot of sense and I actually didn't realize that that community component was so important for for verifying and validating that data but that it makes it that makes a lot of sense right you're just getting your users to keep reinforcing what's good and what's not um and then I guess like the last question I would have for you just about Lucia a lot of the focuses on LinkedIn um speak to me about um some of the because I'm out you know like you're preaching to the choir I'm already bought into to using LinkedIn but coming from you and what you see what are the benefits of using LinkedIn versus just calling or just email um you know I think I think LinkedIn today is the online CV so and you have more data points that are you know exclusive for LinkedIn that you can you can just learn about the profit and so what we see from salespeople is just is that they're trying to know who they are going to call to and what about what happened with this company so that they will make sure that they're they're you know they're they're uh talking about the right things and the right time and not reaching out to companies in bed timing or or people who just you know I know the people they want to talk to so LinkedIn have a lot of layers that can help you do that and that's why they have salespeople are there um but there are other solutions as well that you can get more intent data about uh people even without LinkedIn um and these kind of things that we are building as well so in general you need to have as much as information as possible before you pick up the phone uh and LinkedIn is another great source to do that very good um so before we you know finish with some like rapid fire questions was there anything that you were working on with Lucia that you wanted to chat about or anything that we didn't go into yeah um um yeah I mean uh you know I think uh something that um is part of my my learnings in in building a company which might be interesting is that I think which a lot which people doesn't really understand is that building a company and specifically if it works even if it's not it's it's a learning journey um because if even if if you're not succeeding and if something doesn't work well then you need to learn and you need to start identify what doesn't work there and and just identify and take the company out of this uh you know this position but if you're succeeding and if you're growing really really fast it's still the same because every three to six months the company looks totally different and as a founder and as a leader and any department your job is changing uh very quickly and and you need to adopt new skills and learn new stuff and if you don't do that you just uh stay on the same stand for and so you're not growing so I think the the mindset of learning is is something that um uh I was trying to to encourage people to be in this state of mind not being right but being committed to learning um and and and and yeah and I think I think that's that's really good advice for the life but specifically for building a company in the business world good advice um okay uh what is one myth about entrepreneurship that you would like to debunk something that isn't true wow um for there's a lot that you've encountered over your career but I think every entrepreneur thinks in a lot of times that you know yeah in in in my company it's different and and here it's special and in in my case it should it's like that and everyone thinks that he's used to do special and honestly uh and and also I said a lot and along the way you understand that you probably know that special and a lot of other companies did something very similar to that and and when something doesn't work for you it's not because you're a special it's usually because you doesn't have a vision or you doesn't have a leadership there and so what you need to do is is take your hands uh being some do some hands-on work and build up the vision so when you know the vision you can delegate and then it works so um I think uh you just so you can learn from other companies and just solve your own problem. Good advice very good advice um what are some resources it could be um it could be a podcast you like could be a book it could be a mentor or a person that has helped you that you would recommend people go and check out. Wow uh I read a lot of books um in general I think uh you know I'm a young entrepreneur in Israel when you you graduated in age of 27 so I I love the company very early on in my career so I read a lot of books and I think anything that bothered me I tried to find book or post or anything to just learn and solve that because if I want solve it no one will and uh and so uh if you want some you know some names um the things that I'm reading right now which is probably one of the best book is uh 15 commitments for conscious leadership um and it's a great book uh it's by um Jim uh that that's my uh it's a great book I think I learned a lot from that and it's really shaped the way they were I tried to manage it randomly. Good that's actually one that's never been recommended before so that's uh like I have a shelf behind me with a whole bunch of books I have to go check that out because I've never had I never heard about that one before but that's good thank you um okay uh let's see uh what else did I want to go into oh and then one question that I ask everybody um what does true success mean for you in work or personal life? Oh beautiful question um you know true success um is is actually doing I like to build stuff but the true success in my opinion is just do what you love to do and for me do what I love to do means also work with the people I love to work and I always try to work with people that you know provide and give me energy and not taking energy out of me so it's people that I can spend you know full day with them without even noticing so when you have the the the the weekly meeting on schedule you just you have to because you love to spend time with this person so I think one of the beautiful part is when building a company that you can choose the people that you really enjoy spend time with and so you can both work and and have fun and and I think if you have that and you can be in that team just wake up and enjoy what you're doing and that's the beautiful part of this map I love that that's a really good answer um and then the most important question uh where do people connect with you where do people go um check out Lucia uh your social media yours are the companies so first LinkedIn I mean anyone can reach out on LinkedIn and and my and my contact details are also available on Lucia and my email and everything so I answer to anyone try to would love to connect with anyone who you