Introducing CEO & Co-founder Bobby Pinero of Equals.
So far, they’ve raised $6.6M from David Sacks of Craft Ventures and are building an Excel-killer.
In this article: 📝
🚨 Anti YC advice
✍️ Writing on LinkedIn
🚧 More friction can be a good thing
🔑 Founder-led sales is overrated
📣 Early marketing is underrated
💰 Monetizing ASAP
Can you tell people who you are and what you've been working on?
I'm Bobby.
I have been an analyst for the last decade. Before I started Equals, I was at a company called Intercom.
I was there for eight years. I ran finance analytics, biz ops, a few other teams, and joined when it was 20 people, and left when it was 700 people.
So I saw it go from under a million ARR to almost $200 million ARR.
I started equals a year and a half ago.
Equals comes from the simple insight that the spreadsheet is actually the best way to work with data.
It’s the only tool that allows you to manipulate data, to touch and feel it, to move things around, build compounding formulas, build sophisticated models—and it's this fully flexible canvas on which you can do almost any analysis.
I heard you spent 15 months building Equals before getting a user, is that true?
Yeah. We knew from the get-go that the bar for a spreadsheet is really high.
People get annoyed by little things that don't work there. They're expecting Excel to work in certain ways. They're expecting Google Sheets to work in certain ways.
If Equals doesn't work like that then we’re at risk of losing a customer.
We spent 15 months building the product without having a single person on it.
That's very anti YC advice. 🚨
But it's also one of the things that makes us defensible over time—what we're building is really hard to build and there aren't many folks out there that could replicate it.
You have to have a lot of conviction if you’re going to spend that much time building without validating.
So, how did you get your first user or customer?
I wrote a lot on our blog. I wrote a lot on LinkedIn. I wrote a lot.
Our first customer came in through that content. It was the CFO of a company called Umba.
He wrote in saying that he'd been reading the content, found it super useful, really appreciated it.
We started talking and swapped thoughts on things.
When Equals was finally ready to start having users on the product, I called them up and I said,
“Hey, look, I'd love to show you what we're building and give you a demo and see if it'd be something that'd be useful or interesting for you.”
That led them to jump in on the product. And they're still one of our most active and happy customers.
When did you know you were onto something?
It wasn't really until probably a couple of months after we had a first version that we could onboard people on.
We'd gotten a few rounds of feedback. We'd incorporated that feedback into the product. We made some pretty meaningful improvements to like performance and things like that fix a lot of bugs.
Then I was jumping on demos and the product was working really smoothly.
Now, the thing to remember is, most early demos don’t go well. Most conversations that you have with folks are ‘nos’ in the early days.
But then we were getting a resounding ‘yes’ from other users.
It was like, “holy shit, somebody's finally done it. I've been looking for this product for the last like five years.”
I was like, okay, there's something here.
What was your aha moment?
My background is in analytics. I am not a sales person but I was jumping on demos.
It just wasn't an energizing thing for me. It wasn't something that I particularly found myself strong at.
One of the aha moments was like,
“We should hire a sales person to help us sell this product.”
We hired a sales person.
A lot of folks told us we were crazy. A lot of folks told us that the founders should be doing the first 100 sales, or pick your number.
That's bullshit.
Hiring a sales person was probably the best decision that we've made.
Another aha moment was when we launched import scripts, which is a way for you to connect Equals to any tool, any API, any internal tool.
You can build your own integrations with JavaScript and Python.
And so the week that we launched it, we saw a big surge of CTOs and technical folks signing up and buying Equals.
That's something that we've continued to double down on:
Can we reach out to more CTOs?
Can we tailor a little bit more content towards them?
What are they doing in the product?
What are misconceptions about getting early traction?
#1: There's a misconception about not trying to monetize customers or not trying to get revenue—just get folks on your product, get them using it, get them giving you feedback, things like that.
Takeaway
I actually think as soon as you possibly can, you should be charging and trying to charge some meaningful amount from customers… building revenue is one of the most meaningful things that you can do to prove that your business is actually working.
They're actually forking over real money.
And so we really pushed to monetize, pushed to charge people, pushed to get people paying, and pushed to grow a real business.
Don't just try to get, you know, user counts up because that might go away.
As you try to actually monetize, you might find that people aren't willing to pay what you want them to pay.
You might find you can't build a business off of it.
You might find it wasn’t as valuable as people said it was.
It was when you actually asked them to pay. So charge as early as you can.
#2: Another misconception is that less friction is better.
Everybody's like,
“You should have the least amount of friction possible in getting into the product.”
In every case I've seen with Equals, even at Intercom, less friction was actually worse converting people to paying customers.
You're gonna get a lot of people who are really just coming through.
Adding more friction in the signup process was better for retention and conversion.
When I say more friction, it's like:
Requiring a credit card upfront
Requiring them to jump on a call with you to get onboarded
Talk to a sales person
Takeaway
It’s counter-intuitive, but I would say from everything I've seen, more friction is better than less friction in the signup process.
Can you walk us through an early experiment?
One experiment we did was around exactly that point of less friction, more friction.
When we started Equals many customers came in through a sales type process.
You couldn't sign up on our marketing site, you couldn't get into the product without talking to somebody on the equals team.
We'd do a demo.
We’d then manually send you a Stripe invoice and you'd get onboarded onto the product that way.
Then we launched and built a whole self serve flow, and we said,
“Okay, we want people to just sign up on the marketing site, connect the data source, start a trial, get in, maybe play with a sample data set, et cetera, et cetera.”
We dropped the price too.
And all we saw was worse and worse performance in our business.
There's a lot of infrastructure required to make self service work well. Modals, workflows, help docs, emails, etc.
All that stuff needs to be built in order to support a great experience.
That's just a big investment. That's a big commitment. It takes time.
I do hope Equals one day will be a self-serve product.
How much did luck play a role?
My co-founder Ben was available right when I was leaving Intercom and he looking for his next thing, and was excited about Equals.
Our head of engineering was about to leave Intercom and was looking for his next thing too, and getting excited about Equals. So those were lucky breaks.
But in a lot of ways, Equals is a byproduct of 10 years of work for me.
I've known for a long time that I wanted to start a company, ever since I left college.
I've just kept a notebook, writing down ideas of different things that I wanted to build, of companies that I wanted to start.
What would you do differently?
I wish I could've spent more time building content and trying to build a bigger audience in the early days.
So if I could go back to the beginnings of Equals again, I'd just be cranking out content left and right.
Trying to build a bigger audience for myself on Twitter and on LinkedIn.
I also wish I had hired one marketer, maybe two marketers earlier on.
What advice would you give to people trying to get their project off the ground?
Build for yourself.
One of the advantages for Equals is that I am the target audience.
Our target audience begins with early stage founders, operators, finance folks, etc.
My advantage is that I deeply understand who those folks, and the problems that they have, what they're thinking about, and how to talk to them.
If you're a founder who is building something for yourself, I think you have a huge advantage than those who don't.
If you're not your own user, then do whatever it takes to deeply understand that person’s job—go do their job for a little while if that’s what it takes.
Keep trying to live and breathe the life of your users.
That’s all folks! Thanks for reading.
Step 1: Check out Equals and make sure to sign up and get a demo
Step 2: Please share or forward this post on social media
Step 3: Check out the other Traction interviews