Traction: Steve Sewell of Builder.io
Co-founder and CEO Steve Sewell reveals how they got off the ground
Introducing Steve Sewell, co-founder and CEO of Builder.io.
Builder raised a $14M Series A and has customers such as Everlane, ShopStyle, and Atoms. Steve shares his story about the early days of getting Builder off the ground and offers advice for early stage founders early in their journey.
Sneak peek…
Some of the things we talk about:
Specific experiments and growth tactics
Common misunderstandings about getting early stage traction
Landing his first customer and early users
Wasting a year on rebuilding the product
The importance of marketing and why data matters
I asked him 10 questions and he goes deep. Let’s go!
1. Hey Steve! Can you tell people who you are and what you’ve been building?
I'm Steve, co-founder and CEO of Builder. We make a visual CMS.
Builder fills that gap between page builders like Webflow, which is great for SMBs but not enterprise, and the other extreme of headless CMSs, which are wildly rigid.
2. How far along was Builder when you started seeing initial signs of traction?
It was a while… I fully stopped doing any real work for other companies at the end of 2017.
So I spent all of 2018 working on the first version of builder and effectively wasting a year.
I realized at the end of the year, I worked really hard all year to build the platform that I knew was needed.
I did my first demo to Everlane at the end of that year and realized within about three minutes of demoing that I missed the mark and they hadn't even said anything yet.
As I was describing how Builder works and how they can use it, it became obvious that I had not put myself directly in the customer's shoes at a high level.
I actually started to throw away all that code and started building this thing right.
More importantly, I needed a more customer-centric focus. I had a better sense of what they needed from that conversation.
So I built a very scrappy MVP towards what they needed… but they still didn't bite.
I actually went and got ShopStyle, my old employer, on Builder. (We’ll get into that.)
That was in 2019 and I spent almost nine months of 2019 building out the product again, but this time, constantly working with their team to validate every single thing I was doing.
That was really, really impactful.
Then in 2020 is when some of those people like VistaPrint stumbled upon us, we finally closed Everlane at that time as well.
That's when we started seeing our first few people just kind of find us whether it was really just in-network and a couple people on GitHub and figuring out how to work a sale that the enterprise sales process.
I think at 2021 is when we started first seeing our first real sort of incremental, you know, “growth is actually happening!” more consistently.
Takeaways
Empathize with the user’s problems
It’s okay to start over and rebuild the product
3. How did you get your first user or customer?
I went to who is now my co-founder Brent, who was running Shopstyle, and said:
“Hey, use this product, and I will personally build whatever you need me to build, not just within the product, but on the shops, our website,” because I knew the shops and our business inside and out.
…And I knew they constantly wanted to do updates to their homepage and other pages, like landing pages, and they needed updates to their homepage.
…And I knew they never had resources for it. There's always other engineering work that was more pressing.
I basically said,
“I will do hours and hours and hours of work and build out that whole new homepage that you want, and all you have to do is pay me like $90 a month for the product.”
So essentially giving away really expensive human services for free to just use the product. Brent liked the idea, but I had to convince my old boss, who was the VP of Engineering at ShopStyle.
Brent suggested I take him out to wine because he loved wine. So I did, and did my best to convince them that this would be a good idea—more positives than potential drawbacks.
Luckily he said yes. So that was how we got number one… a company I knew well and was connected with.
I was really just offering up tons of free coding services for a nominal platform fee. You know, almost it was almost like cheating, but I do think that's the line you can play with.
As an early stage founder, start giving away services. Everybody needs services, everybody needs coding or whatever it is.
Maybe it's marketing, who knows, but there's probably something that you could provide that would normally cost hundreds an hour for the business to pay you.
You could just offer for free and just say, “pay the fee for my product instead,” and that works surprisingly well.
Then you can start shifting that balance over time to the point where you're not offering any services anymore.
So that's a funny trick you can do to get early customers.
Takeaways
Learn how to sell early on
Sell to companies within network via referrals
Offer free work by having the customer pay for only the software fee and you do the implementation, etc.
4. When did you know you were onto something?
I think it was about the time that we were starting to get like real interest, not just like your friends, your mom thinks it's cool, the broader ecosystem, people online, random people online reading it…
Validation point #1: Talking to buyers
Those are good validation points, but it was really when I started talking to real enterprise buyers.
And I remember when I was meeting all sorts of people throughout the VistaPrint teams and talking to them saying, “yessss, this makes sense!”
This is what we needed… and kudos to them, especially Daniel and Jacob on their team who really were able to work with alpha software, poor documentation, and figure out how to get it working, while understanding the value and seeing through the cracks and the imperfections at the time.
I think it was Reid Hoffman that says you need to be embarrassed of your initial MVP….
Validation point #2: People were using the product despite flaws
I know this is regurgitating what I've seen others say but it’s “if you made a really crappy product, are people still using it anyway?”
That's a good sign that you're solving a big enough problem.
If you make a perfect product or if requires a perfect product to get traction, you might not be solving a big enough problem.
Crappy products that people like is a good way to approach it. And since then, we've been able make the product a lot better and have good validation that that's worth our time.
Takeaways
Talking to enterprise customers gave him validation
If users are still using your crappy MVP, you might be onto something
If you make a perfect product or if requires a perfect product to get traction, you might not be solving a big enough problem
5. Did you have an “aha!” moment? If so, what was it?
There was one huge aha for me… I realized that my assumptions were wrong.
I wasted a year of my time building the wrong thing and was running out of runway, and that I had 12 months to talk to a real customer only to realize that I had been right about certain things but wrong and a couple of key fundamental areas.
I had this realization, cause I only had enough runway to last for one more year before my make account would run dry.
I remember I looked at my savings out of college and it was going up, up, up, up, up. Then I started at a certain point where I had little runaway and saw that my savings went down, down, down, down, down.
Cashflow was literally right on the cusp of zero before we raised our seed round… and then I could start climbing up again.
So if it takes me another 12 months to find the next mistake, I can only afford one more mistake.
Knowing entrepreneurship, I knew that there was going to be a lot more mistakes I need to make than one…
And I don't have time to wait a year for each mistake, so I drastically recalibrated and I removed the assumption from my head that I really knew anything.
I needed to make sure that anything I thought I knew was just assumptions and hypothesis and I need to validate them.
I was able to shorten the validation cycle from 12 months to as little as 12 hours.
When I made an MVP and got ShopStyle on it, I only spent about a week making the most minimal possible thing.
We got Bre from ShopStyle to start using the product, and I asked her everything, and tested everything on her and I would constantly improve the product if she needed something.
That was a very rapid way to get direct validation.
And the faster you could find out and constantly calibrate if you're on track or not is game changing.
That's been very influential to our company culture—not doing these elaborate sort of product brainstorming sessions and giant roadmaps.
Just being hyper-focused and obsessed with the customer and being very iterative and very rapidly delivering, building, measuring, learning constantly and incorporating feedback through the process as much as possible.
I came from B2C world where we want to measure and A/B test everything.
I really learned through this, the extremely wealth of information that comes from qualitative feedback, that data is critical.
You need data. We probably already know that, but people love to neglect qualitative feedback and go like, “I'll just throw darts at the dart board until the data goes up.”
It's like, no, no, no, you need to, you need people to tell you about their experience with the product. You need to watch someone as they use the product virtually or physically over their shoulder.
Just obsess over getting qualitative feedback and deliver iteratively.
Takeaways
Talk to your users and customers
Rapid testing on customers was the biggest aha for Steve
You need people to tell you about their experience with the product
Remove the assumption that you really know anything
Data is vitally important
6. What do you think are common misunderstandings and misperceptions about getting early traction?
Misunderstanding #1
The most common misunderstanding is PR, by far.
I think it's two things on one extreme. It's engineers who, whether they think it explicitly or implicitly believe in, that if you build it, they will come.
...“I'm just going to build the best product ever. And then growth will happen, right? Obviously, like somebody will find it and then they'll love it.”
You continue lying to yourself, “and then they'll tell everybody else to use it. And then they'll spread virally or spread in some form!”
That doesn't happen very much… at least maybe on extremely rare circumstances, but very, very, very rare, so don't bank on it.
Misunderstanding #2
The second misunderstanding is that people think they can make a grand plan on how they’re going to grow.
That's another one that people with a product/engineering background like myself tend to do and say, “it's gonna be product-led growth because we're gonna build these hooks, and these loops these viral elements into the product.”
You're making an enormous amount of assumptions and these things are, are in actuality so complex and unpredictable.
The reality is need to test.
You need to have a ton of hypotheses and you to find the simplest ways to start testing these hypotheses.
Are there loops you can bake into the product, or it is just that your product, your segment, your market, are just not conducive to that or how you fit into the ecosystem?
Should you be doing sales outbounding, should you be doing content marketing so that you'd be marketing on social media?
All of these things, you will never have a clear answer until you try it.
Process for identifying traction channels
So then your first thought is like, “okay, what's everybody doing?” They’re probably do outbounding prospecting. So like, okay, we'll hit the outbounding, but it's really critical that you don't say that's what will work?
You say, “well, that's my first hypothesis based off of averaging out what I see these other types of companies doing,” and I will start there, but then you're probably going to have to get a lot more creative after that.
You will have to dip into your plan B, C, D, and be able to run these experiments as quickly as possible.
If you are some type of B2B that’s mid-market to enterprise, you will need someone to sell the product. It's usually be the founders at first.
Eventually you're doing it enough where you have a very much well-defined repeatable piece of work you can hand off.
The wrong approach would be to say, “oh, I need to outbound. So I'm going to hire an SDR or multiple SDRs.”
That could be a bad idea because you don't know that's not proven yet. So hiring ahead of proof can be a risky business.
These misperceptions of just assuming what should work or would work is the big problem, rather than experimenting and figuring it out.
Takeaways
Experiment or die
Don’t think creating a grand master plan will ever work
If you build it, they won’t necessarily come
Assuming what should work is the big problem
7. Walk us through some early experiments.
GitHub and investing in open source
Some experiments are extremely low cost. So we put some open source stuff out on GitHub.
Instead of putting projects in a bunch of GitHub repos, I put them all in one, and I just made the Builder repo with everything open source-related.
I thought some people might discover us on GitHub, and it'd be nice to concentrate that in one place where you could have one repo that gets some reasonable amount of GitHub stars.
What's funny is we did that. We put out some blog content, and we did some of the basics. And then over time we started to observe that a couple of these things, namely the GitHub repo was driving business to us.
We were later able to find through just asking people how they found out about us. They're like, “oh yeah, I searched by drag and drop for React. I landed on your get hub, read me. And then I went and signed up and tried out the platform.”
Figma plugin
We experimented with a Figma plugin when Figma first opened up their plugin system in beta.
One thing I'd always observed is sometimes the most popular plugins in various ecosystems, whether it's a very popular Shopify app or a visual studio code plugin, a lot of times, they were just the first.
There's so many first-mover advantages in any marketplace type situation. I just wanted to get a Figma plugin and be the first at something useful.
The Figma plugin would essentially pull the website into Figma to be editable.
It would mention “Made In Builder” and later we had it export designs to Builder.
So you can go design to code, or you can design to live website if you've integrated the Builder. So that was yet another experiment.
Prioritize your bets
There's a million strategies we tried.
We did experiments with content like SEO content, like blog posts, in-depth from different topics or, or shallow in different topics.
We spoke at conferences. We put up content on social media, we've done webinars, we've done live streams. We've set up SEO, optimized landing pages.
The key takeaway with early stage growth is that you've got to prioritize your experiments.
Don't just shock and blast everything at once. Really look at what makes sense and just start working down the list.
And it's always, definitely a little bit of art and science to know, well, how deep should I go on each one?
And I think that's mostly, you look at an ROI basis, right? How much work does it take you to shoot out?
If anything starts showing results, double down on it, or if you have a good reason to say that X thing really, really should work, maybe you put medium-sized effort into it.
Partnerships
Partnerships was a good one. That one definitely took some work. We had a lot of proof points that this was actually a good strategy, similar businesses were using.
We looked at agency partnerships, system integrator partnerships, technology partnerships with CMS, with ecommerce platforms, and totally different stuff entirely like Cloudinary for digital asset management.
So rather than just like a little test, we put a decent effort. We didn't put everything into it, but we put a medium-sized effort and that did pay off over time.
Takeaways
Immediately double down on what’s working
They invested in GitHub and open source
Figma plugin worked really well
Partnerships for longer term success
Prioritize your bets
8. How much did luck play a role in that early traction? Did you create your own luck?
Luck was definitely a factor.
One of the most important things that happened to us was Daniel at Vistaprint found a super is early, and he reached out and requested some features to the product.
I was like, “yeah, that's a great idea.” That worked out. They became one of our early enterprise customers, and we had a few other just like coincidental circumstances like that.
Once you start closing some good logos, put them on your website.
That can really get you into a state where the product is better, more polished, and refined, and it's more proven because you have logos—you have validation, you have customers that you can reference.
Having logos makes customer traction a lot easier. Closing your 10th deal is a lot easier than closing your first deal.
…But I do agree with creating your own luck, or it's more like you're sewing a lot of seeds, right?
You know, each seed could bear a great fruit, or it might not. Every action you take has a probability of getting lucky. So if you don't take any actions, you have zero probability of getting lucky.
If you take a lot of actions, your probability of getting lucky goes up and up. So take a lot of actions, run a lot of experiments.
It's nice to be lucky, but it's nice to make your own luck too, so you can replicate and you can grow your business past these lucky moments as well.
Takeaways
Every action you take has a probability of getting lucky
9. What would you do differently?
I would have gotten on Twitter sooner, and the main reason is because I really had no marketing background.
So, you build up over time skills with engineering and product, and worked hard after that to sell the product, and get comfortable at sales.
Marketing is a muscle you have to build through practice and trial and error.
In order to start driving meaningful learnings, you need to be able to it pretty quickly.
So I remember distilling it down and saying, I need to get my hands on some marketing medium so that I can trial and error, and learn my way to understanding this medium, the channels, et cetera.
So I started really going after Twitter. It'd be like, “hey, you know, why is it that when one person tweets something simple, it can get an enormous amount of traction, reception engagements?”
And when I, or, or majority of people do, it gets none… like, what are these simple differences that are so impactful, these nuances?
I started to rapid trial and error things to get a feel for like what is impactful to people and why.
Marketing is all about immediate impact. You can't find out somebody's life story before you tell them what your value is.
You need just to have a generic sentence that will be as impactful as possible to as many relevant people as possible.
I'd wish I'd built it up sooner. I've read plenty of sales and marketing books, but you know, the practice of it, the doing of it is, is the critical component.
When you marry those two, you can make a lot of progress.
Takeaways
Don’t underestimate how important marketing is
Get on Twitter sooner
10. What advice would you give to founders looking to get their startup off the ground?
1) Be customer-obsessed
Let the customer guide you. If you want to make a successful business, you need product-market-fit, which means you have a product people need and want.
How do you find out what people need and want? You talk to them constantly. And you validate on every single person, and you ask, “is this what you need and want?”
2) Test your assumptions with experiments
Be lean, make MVPs, and remind yourself every morning, every evening, and just constantly, that what you think, what you know …you don't actually know until you prove it.
So prove it as soon as possible because you're gonna start building assumptions on top of assumptions, and you can start building features on top of assumptions or go-to market-plans without assumptions.
You need to test those assumptions sooner and often, and then you need to retest them as well.
Takeaways
Be customer-focused
Test your assumptions with experiments
Thanks for reading!
Follow Steve on Twitter @Steve8708 and check out Builder.io.
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