Transcript: Yanir Calisar | How to build an enterprise product with hundreds of customers over a weekend

Intro and meeting Yanir

Eyal David: [00:00] Hi friends, this is Eyal. You've reached Product Builder, where you can listen to the most interesting product conversations. My journey started in 2012 when I learned what product is at my own startup. Since then I've worked in the industry, and since 2017 my company has been advising a wide range of companies. My drive is to help all of us get better as product people. And before we start, if you enjoy listening to Product Builder, please rate us five stars on Spotify. It'll give me great feedback that the podcast is giving you value, and it'll make me very happy. So yalla, let's start. Yanir, what's up?

Yanir Calisar: [00:41] Honestly, excellent, how are you, bro? So great that you came. I'm glad we finally made it, we tried for a long time. A really long time.

Eyal David: [00:50] But I don't want to steal the listeners' time, so I'll introduce you. With us is Yanir, an entrepreneur with a background in ten startups, who today advises, is writing a book, and also invests. A bit, yeah. We've pegged you as a Renaissance man and I gave you a whole intro. Yalla. I embarrassed you. So tell us briefly who you are and what you've done.

Yanir Calisar: [01:11] Well, you said it all, kidding. So, Yanir, 39, from Tel Aviv. For the last 15 years I've been working with startups, I've been involved in more than ten. I'd say six of them were successful, and of those six I led three. I try to do a lot of things in my life, from music to sports and a lot of creative things. And one of the things I love doing is building companies and building products. I think among friends I'm known as the guy represented by three things: SaaS, enterprise and B2B. That's what I've been doing for the last 15 years.

Eyal David: [02:03] Before we dive into that, tell us a bit about what you play, tell us a little about your creative side.

Playing by ear and a childhood of technical curiosity

Yanir Calisar: [02:11] So I've played piano since I was 6. Wow. Yeah, except for... apart from three months when I studied with a teacher we didn't really get along with, and to this day she doesn't know I can't read sheet music, so since then I play on my own, I play by ear. I can also play a bit of guitar and drums and even violin, which I have at home. The dream is the double bass, we'll get there. And that's it, more art, you mean? You said it. So I'm also writing a book now, for the past year,

Eyal David: [02:43] trying to write, we'll see where it leads. Help me focus on something: you said you play by ear, and that's a bit like how you build companies, or at least the path you took, right? Yes. Did you actually go study it, tell us if you want, but programming is something you taught yourself, right? Yes, I've always been technical for as long as I can remember.

Yanir Calisar: [03:05] I think in fourth grade, my computer teacher, Ludmila, taught us how websites, how the internet works, and it made me very curious how it really works behind the scenes, not just websites and emails. We're talking about 1995, I believe. My grandfather, of blessed memory, I think that's where the whole family got the technical side from, he was one of the first to have a computer at home back in the '80s, around '85 he already had some computer, and he taught us what email is. When we were, I guess when I was 5 or 6, he showed us how a computer works. And then, yes, I started building websites on my own in fourth grade. Didn't you end up breaking the computer at that age? Yes. As a kid, electrical appliances at home would break on a regular basis. You're a curious person who isn't afraid to get his hands dirty. Yes, and I think when I was 11 or 12 my father realized he could feel comfortable letting me do jobs around the house. He doesn't really like dealing with drilling and electricity and that stuff, so from that age I took all of that on myself. Over the years I got electrocuted a few times, two specific times that the family remembers. One of them we can talk about, it's funny and fun. Good things came out of it. The other one less so, including one time I tripped the power for half the neighborhood, but we won't get into that here.

Eyal David: [04:43] So tell us about your path to Tuvis, the company is called Tuvis, right? Yes. From that moment of getting electrocuted, the one of the two you're willing to tell.

From mall carts to business development: Insightera and the Marketo acquisition

Yanir Calisar: [04:52] All the way from age 12, from getting electrocuted by a lamp. So I think the Tuvis story starts long before, I think back in 2010, when I had just started my bachelor's degree, I joined as the first employee at a startup that wasn't even a startup yet. I joined the two founders before there was even an idea; there was a technology they didn't quite know how to explain. What it would do and what value it would provide. And you came in wearing a technical hat, right? No, not at all. I'm not a technical person in the end, because I was on my way to study marketing, technology marketing, at Sapir. There was a point where I said maybe I'll go study computer science or software engineering, electrical engineering. And I told myself that it wouldn't, it would excite me less to wake up every morning to go to work and write code. But it would interest me more to broaden my familiarity with fields I hadn't been exposed to up to that point, and there were quite a few. And I think that degree in technology marketing is a degree focused on business development, sales, marketing and so on, but on the other hand it also exposed me a lot to technological fields, suddenly biology and chemistry and physics and economics. I mean, a very, very wide range of fields that sparked my imagination and my thinking in new areas,

Eyal David: [06:21] and basically how to bring entrepreneurship into those fields. So let's go back to those guys who took you on in a non-technical hat. If so, why did they take you? So I came to do sales,

Yanir Calisar: [06:31] I came to really be the business development hat in the company. What background did you have in sales? Nothing. Ah, I did the mall carts. Carts, ah, that's a background. Which, yes, it's a good background, it's a background in knowing how to be a pest, but yes, it's an excellent background and it's also about persistence. Um... and... and knowing that at the end of the day, I mean, the day ended successfully. Um... I think a lot... many months I worked the carts and really made good money in the end, and I also really, really enjoyed it. I know, that's unusual, most people around me who did the carts suffered. Um... so yes, it gave me, it gave me something very, very important at that point in time, and within, uh... I mean, so Mike, who was one of the founders, who... I knew him from before, I told him, listen, I don't understand anything about this world, you know. What world were they in? What... So we developed a technology that helps B2B companies do personalization, in 2010. Yes, in real time on the website, according to... for anonymous visitors who arrive: if you come from a bank you see one message, if you come from a university you see a different message. We really were the first in the world to do that. The company, within three years, I started in sales and gradually moved into product and more technological things. And three years after that Marketo acquired the company, and at Marketo I had an amazing opportunity to work with the biggest companies in the world and solve challenges to help them, with very, very interesting challenges they had, from the Marketo platform, and many times even develop solutions for them, micro solutions like that, specific and very, very targeted,

Eyal David: [08:15] to solve those problems for them. So let's break that down for a second: A, what hat did you come in with there, and B, a company like that running on micro solutions, maybe expand on that a bit, it sounds intriguing.

Inside Marketo: micro solutions for enterprise customers

Yanir Calisar: [08:25] Yes, so actually because I knew our technology very well as an insider, from the first startup, both from the customer side and from the technological side of the product, in the first two years I was a kind of champion of the technology, and I worked with the R&D there, and product and customer success and sales and marketing, I was really all over the place. It was a very interesting opportunity, because it was a company that at the time was traded on NASDAQ, a company with 1,600 employees, so I was in San Francisco a lot, and the hat basically, I mean, I led the process of integrating Insightera into Marketo. And Marketo at the time, it still is today, but back then it was really a household name here in Israel, pretty much every big company used Marketo, so we were a kind of Marketo development center in Israel, it was a very, very big source of pride for us. Did they actually have a center here before they bought the company? No. So they basically built it around you, that's what you're saying? It was around me, we were a team, the founders stayed, or... Yes, yes, the founders Miki and Mike stayed, and I, I mean, in the end I was on the customer success side, and I led that integration between the customers and the product. That's it, we really had a big development team here. I don't think that's so interesting; what is interesting is that the point is, for all three years I was there, I didn't have an official role as such, I had a mix of all kinds of half-roles, partial roles that I filled. I think the interesting point is that I was in a position where on one hand I was talking with very complex, very sophisticated Marketo customers, companies like Microsoft and Amazon and eBay and Google, really very, very interesting and big and with a lot of challenges. On the other hand I was the one who goes back to the VP R&D or even the CTO and tells them, guys, this is what's needed here, because this is how we'll solve the problem. And in many cases I'd get feedback like, listen, yes, but it'll take us a few years to get to that. Now, at first that frustrated me a bit, because I said it's not very hard to develop this thing, to make the connection, the integration, this small feature. And on the other hand I also understood how it works, suddenly I saw how an enterprise operates. And there was a team at Marketo whose whole job in life was to develop solutions like that for customers, to tell them, listen, let's build you some custom solution for this thing and we'll charge you a lot of money and everyone will be happy. And I sat with that team a lot, because I understood this was a practice that, if I learned it, could really help me build a startup in the future.

Eyal David: [11:28] Amazing, you understood that in real time. Really in real time.

Yanir Calisar: [11:32] And I really stuck to them, and beyond asking them what kinds of solutions they develop and what the development process is and so on, I really got into the details of the DevOps and the development itself. I really looked at what they do there and how they do it. It interested me a lot because sometimes these were requests that repeated themselves. The same connection between Marketo and Google Analytics that doesn't exist in the product but dozens, if not hundreds, of customers want. And I'd ask, what are you doing, it's the same product, and then I understood how it works: you take the same code, simply put it on a different server, put it in a different configuration, and it just works for that customer. Later, when I left Marketo a bit after the acquisition by Adobe, so I basically went through another acquisition journey with them, I understood that this is what I'm going to do. It took me time; in the middle there was a lag with a startup that, in my eyes, was a very, very interesting idea, it simply didn't, it didn't catch on, so I worked on that idea for half a year and closed it. And then I understood that what we should have done is exactly what I saw happening at Marketo. Wait, for you half a year, I understand that's a long time.

Eyal David: [12:51] So basically, just give it a second, you developed that startup too, was it also a B2B enterprise-oriented idea, how was it?

Yanir Calisar: [13:01] Only B2B, only SaaS, only enterprise. Yes, it was a solution to basically connect data from the CRM, from Salesforce, connect it to Google Analytics and to advertising systems in order to personalize

Eyal David: [13:15] the advertising, the ads you run, based on data you have about existing customers in the CRM. So let's not go there. So basically you said, OK, I'm swapping the two things that connect.

12 small solutions and the WhatsApp message that gave birth to Tuvis

Yanir Calisar: [13:27] How was the idea of Whatsly actually born? So just a second before that: after I killed the first idea, after half a year, I founded a company whose whole essence was to build micro solutions like that, to identify problems or challenges that marketing people have that can be solved with plugins, with simple integrations or some automation I can build, or to take very, very big and expensive systems and simply distill them into the specific features that big companies really need. And I got to the point where I had 12 of those, 12 solutions. Each solution, each of those solutions I sold as an annual subscription to very, very big companies in Israel, Amdocs and Taboola and AppsFlyer; abroad I even worked with Elasticsearch and LinkedIn, who were my customers for a while. And that company was very, very successful. How many people were you there? Just me. Just you. So a month of work on a product, where a customer comes to me and says: tell me, how do I solve a problem like this? Or many times I'm talking with VPs of marketing, CMOs, marketing managers at all kinds of companies. I tell them: what's bothering you? Don't think about technology. Tell me what the problem is, what's annoying you, what you're missing, what's not working. And marketing people, I mean, the answers I'd always get were: but that can't be done. Forget that, tell me what's needed, even put a slide in Google Slides, tell me what, describe to me what you'd want, and I'll build it for you. And then once I got or found an interview or heard about a problem, I'd validate it, and the validation process is very short in my head: whether it can be solved technically, and usually I'd find a technical way to solve it. The more interesting validation is business validation. I'd ask that same person, how much would you pay for this solution? If, say, I brought you a solution, would you pay 1,000 dollars a month for it, or an annual subscription, 12,000 dollars? If he said yes, I'd say great, and I'd go to two more companies. Ask them the same question, and if I got a yes and a yes, even if I got just one yes, I have a business. I'd build the product, it would take me a few weeks, and I already have two paying customers. That was basically the model, and for three years that company was very, very successful. Actually, to this day it brings in decent money, because once I implemented it, basically all the interaction I have with that customer is once a year at renewal. Contract renewal, and that's it. Fast forward to 2019, I have a company that's very, very successful, I'm really comfortable in life, everything is fine, and the last thing I want to do is a startup. Friday, 12:30 at night, I get a WhatsApp message from a customer of mine in New York, saying he wants me to check something in the product, whether something can be changed, no, no, not urgent, next week. And I'm just walking my dog, Chico, in the park: how am I going to remember until Monday this message he sent me on WhatsApp now? It's very inefficient, there's no way there isn't a way to automate this thing. And then I thought to myself, wait, maybe WhatsApp could be connected with Marketo. But Marketo is for marketing people, and this isn't a marketing person; here I'm wearing the hat of a salesperson or a customer success person, it's not marketing. I'm like, maybe Salesforce. I started looking on Google, and there were only discussions saying how is there still no solution connecting WhatsApp with Salesforce, what is this. Can you believe it? Yes, and also not many, not many discussions, really few results, and it was like all the dice and all the stars lined up. I said, wow, there's something interesting here, but there's a catch. Because in 2019 WhatsApp has no API and there's no way to do it. I said to myself, wait, wait. When I was at Marketo, some customer asked me to do something. And the development team told me, listen, that'll take two years. I said it can be done faster. And what I did was build a Chrome extension for that customer that solved that problem for him. And I built him that Chrome extension over a weekend. So I already had some Chrome extension code and I said, wait. If that same Chrome extension with the same code can theoretically insert a piece of Salesforce into WhatsApp, into WhatsApp Web. And if I do that, I can make it two-way. And then I can also improve the customer experience for the customer, the one that salesperson is talking to on WhatsApp, because the salesperson will have all the information from Salesforce in front of their eyes. And on the other hand, wait, beyond making it view-only, I can also give that salesperson tools. Create a lead, send an email, set a task, things like that, without leaving the WhatsApp screen, so I'm saving him tons and tons of time. It's productivity. All that thinking took me a minute. I remember I picked Chico up in my arms, ran home, I really remember running home excited, and I said,

Eyal David: [18:53] this is going to be something big. Tell me, I have to cool this down for a second. Like a normal person, didn't you also think about what might not work, where I might get stuck with this enterprise on privacy and things like that, what if WhatsApp comes after me, what did that look like?

The golden 24 hours: time, money and enthusiasm

Yanir Calisar: [19:14] Look, there's no doubt that when you build a startup there's a lot, you run into a lot of crap. I was just talking with, I work with a lot of startups today, I help a lot of startups, mostly early on. And the fears and the worries and the horror stories you hear, it's all true. They told me, listen, it's fun, it's fun to do a startup. I told them, listen, a startup, doing a startup is not fun. It's not fun, it's crap. You eat a lot of hard crap along the way, but when you look back on it, yes, it's fun. Those fears are always there. My trick is, A, to move fast, and B, to be very, very, very focused on what I'm working on right now. I mean, yes, the worries, the fears, I'll get there, we'll solve it, right? In the end these things, it's like, I told you I do a lot of sports, it's like a marathon: if you think about what'll happen at kilometer 37, you won't go out to run, right? So you go out fast, you go out fast, it's doing, that's what it is. So you focus on doing and you leave allotted time, I mean, really dedicated time to think about the worries and about the crap still to come, and that's fine: tomorrow at five, between five and six, I have the time when I think, when I worry, and the rest of the time I write code. I think there are golden 24 hours: when you have an idea, you have an idea, sit down, don't go to sleep that night, do whatever you can that will take you to the furthest milestone you can, because there are three elements working against you when you build a startup. Those are time, money and enthusiasm. Now, the money, given that at the beginning you're still, I hope you have some savings and you're fine, and you haven't left your job yet. Enthusiasm is trending down, and time you can't stop. The only thing you can try to do is, with the enthusiasm you have at the beginning, get as far as you can, so that the moment you'll need the money gets pushed as far away as possible. In the case of Whats, let's say, what became Tuvis, very fast, within a week we closed, I closed the first deal, I still talk about myself in the plural about that period, I was talking with customers, we were building and so on, but within the first week we closed. It's a cute story too. Really in the first week, so within 24 hours there was already an MVP, a really ugly product, but it worked, it did what I wanted it to do. And then 4-5 days pass, I get an email, an Israeli company whose Salesforce admin had set a Google Alert two years earlier, searching for WhatsApp and Salesforce, because their whole sales operation worked on WhatsApp, and it popped up in his Google Alert. So he tells me, listen, I've been waiting two years, two years for your technology. We closed a not very big deal, but he was a kind of design partner, he really told me, listen, not just a lead, I also want a contact, or not just that, add this too. Things that make sense; broadly, they helped me build the product.

Eyal David: [22:52] How amazing, I wonder if he's still a customer. Yes. So take us back a second: you're running with Chico like crazy, going up home, the first milestone in your head, was it really that? Already having a working product after a weekend? Yes, absolutely, I knew exactly what,

From a weekend MVP to AppExchange, Volkswagen and Brazil

Yanir Calisar: [23:07] where I wanted to get to, what my milestone was on Saturday night, Saturday at one in the morning. A Chrome extension that opens inside WhatsApp, shows details of people from Salesforce while I'm chatting with them on WhatsApp, and lets me create a lead inside Salesforce. Because you knew that was the interesting flow, the one that could be sold? I didn't think it would be sellable, but I knew that, for me, it was interesting enough, and if I managed to do it there's, there's a business here. Um... a month later I understood, after I had already closed another customer. Um... And how did he get to you? Also all Google. Most of... I think almost 90 percent, 95 percent of customers came organically. Either they heard about us or read about us somewhere, or really searched proactively and found us. Um... like, we tried after that, two years later, when we raised money, we said, we tried to pour money and get there. Bottom line, the best deals came to us inbound, people who read, heard and searched. Um... but what happened is that a month later I went to talk with VCs. Let's... let's see... like, I understood this was bigger than the rest of the solutions I had at that point, even though they made great money, the rest of the solutions there, but I understood this was something stand-alone. Because of the size of the problem, because it was so easy to bring in customers. Yes, look, in Salesforce, I mean also at Insightera and at Marketo, all of our... all of our interface was with Salesforce, I built dozens if not hundreds of solutions on Salesforce, I know how everything works there, inside and out, I know how salespeople work, I know, I mean, that's my material. Once I understood there was no such solution, it's, you know, it's like in the books, it's, wow, a blue ocean. And I understood the size of the market here was huge. Yes, I understood at that time, I mean, my whole life I worked with the United States, with enterprises in San Francisco, in New York, and I understood there was a different story here, because this isn't the United States. So I also understood that down the line I'd have a problem raising money. Expand on that, because it's WhatsApp. Yes, because WhatsApp, at the level that in the United States, today I think less so, but 5-6 years ago people didn't know what WhatsApp was. Compared to Brazil, yes, maybe you'll touch on that later. So yes, soon we'll tell how we got there, how I understood it's Brazil, but then I understood it would be a bit different, but still I said, there's, once I understood it's something big, I said let's go talk with VCs, let's understand the... let's see what they say. I talked with two or three VCs here in Israel, of course they threw me down the stairs. Afterwards I went back to them, told them, the company is succeeding. By the way, it's funny, because from the outside, I mean, I don't know, a Chrome extension connecting WhatsApp and Salesforce sounds small and not very significant, and by the way I said, wow, this could be a company that simply brings in great money. I didn't believe this was a company that would one day reach dozens of employees and hundreds of customers. We also didn't believe there'd be COVID, and we didn't believe a lot of things would happen to it. You're here just a second before COVID, right? Yes. And you, you're a one-man show, as I understand, you're basically running to VCs trying to raise; in hindsight, did you keep trying to raise? No, it was an attempt of a week or two, I said OK, this isn't, this isn't the direction, let's just build a very, very good product and focus on building the business. And deals came in literally every week. What does building the business mean, what did you go and do? I think most of the time, most of the time, because, I mean, I didn't manage to reach customers myself, customers came to me, and on average I closed a deal every week. Wow. Yes. Not big deals. Fine. Deals of tens of dollars a year, hundreds of dollars a year; the bigger ones were 5,000 dollars a year. Size of the companies? Small. Small, OK. Yes. But I worked, I mean, I set myself milestones of, I don't know, about two months ahead. I remember the serious, big milestone was: OK, if we wanted to bring in big deals, I need to be a Salesforce partner. By the way, I was one of the Salesforce partners, the companies that made the most money with the smallest size at Salesforce, we were two people, and for at least one year we were the Salesforce partner in Latin America that made the most money. Crazy. Anyway, so I said OK, that's the milestone, and then I worked very, very hard, I connected with people who helped me, who guided me, to make that partnership with Salesforce happen. And then we're standing in March 2020, the partnership is ready, everything's ready, I have a launch date. COVID. What the hell, fuck, what do I do. There were a few nights I didn't sleep, because I invested money and a lot of thought and a lot of work in it. And then I said, I'm doing it. Let's go live. I went live on the Salesforce store. Which is what that partnership with Salesforce gives you. Yes, it's the Salesforce store, and broadly they're supposed to send you customers, which usually doesn't happen, but again, that stamp that you're an AppExchange partner. You're also indexed in another place with a lot of eyes on it. Yes, yes, so I go live. OK, you kind of flip the switch and you wait. Nothing happens. A few days pass. I get an email from Volkswagen in Argentina. All their dealers are stuck, working from home. It turns out that in South America car companies sell cars on WhatsApp. There the problem is much bigger. Listen, it's insane. I really, I don't understand it. Now, I'd seen all along that I had traffic to the website from South America, but suddenly I'm talking with people from there, they tell me, listen, we sell cars for 150, 200 thousand dollars, everything happens on WhatsApp. Insane. Now, did they find you on WhatsApp? No, he found me on Google and so on, but from AppExchange he saw it's a partner. Listen, within a month and a half I closed a deal for a lot of money with Volkswagen, all of Volkswagen in Argentina. Crazy. Did you fly there at that moment? What did it look like? No, there are no flights, COVID, I'm here in Israel. That's completely crazy. And then suddenly, now I, again, so I'm going back to what you asked me earlier, privacy and so on. I'm a one-man show, I don't speak Spanish. How do I sell to Volkswagen in Argentina now? So I kind of progress milestone by milestone until the point where you sign the contract. And then, what's the worst-case scenario, right? The product works, it's not a scam, there's a real product, Salesforce vetted me, and that's it, we closed. And suddenly you see thousands of users. And it works. So that was very, very exciting. I can say that I never really held an official product role. And I think one of the things, I see a lot, people asked me, they ask me many times why I didn't go study development. I think there's something special about knowing how to develop, which is a bit like other things I do on the artistic side, it's really a tool for art. You wake up in the morning with an idea, in my case Friday at midnight, and you create something from scratch. You express the idea, the thoughts, what you have inside, in an almost physical way. And that's one part, building the product, which is exciting, it's fun, it's pleasant. The second part is that you see that you're actually solving a problem, you hear people telling you, listen, where were you? How did we not know you? You're saving me. I talked with the CEO of one of our big customers. He tells me, listen, if you knew how much time you're saving us, you'd charge at least ten times more than what you're charging us. At roughly what stage of the company? It was relatively early; today we charge him more. But then I think the second part is seeing that you're delivering the value, and the third part is that people actually pay you for it. They pay not 100. And a few months later, almost a year, a year after I founded the company, someone from Brazil joined me. I basically understood the market there, I understood the difference: I mean, here in Israel we use WhatsApp to do everything. There they use only WhatsApp to do everything. I mean, they don't have emails, they don't use them. If, God forbid, a salesperson calls a customer, he'll lose the customer, to that extent. And so the size of the problem there was much, much, much bigger. When I understood that South America is the market and that's where I have product-market fit, I connected with a Brazilian woman. Boots on the ground? Yes. A Brazilian who had worked a bit at Salesforce, speaks Spanish, connected to enterprises there. How did you connect? On LinkedIn. Just like that? Basically cold outreach? I searched for a long, long time. No, I found her, I was looking for someone to help me do sales, bring in deals. In my naivety I thought I was looking for inside sales, someone who'd just set up the demos and I'd take it and do it. And we really tried doing that at first, it was catastrophic. Brazil. They didn't understand me, didn't... So she told me, let me do the sales. I said, let's try, and within three months she brought in a one-million-dollar deal. Just like that. Wow. With the sixth-largest bank in Brazil. That's crazy, at the bank level. Yes. WhatsApp. Yes. Again, this thing has no alternative. Right? It's either us or nothing. And they have a problem, because they have to use something,

Eyal David: [33:54] so they use you. I want to ask you something while you're collecting your thoughts. Suddenly you have a lot of customers who don't speak English. You said that one of the significant things is that you know how to listen really well to problems, so how does that work when suddenly the language isn't English?

Listening to the customer and distilling the real problem

Yanir Calisar: [34:10] I think that was one of our biggest challenges. Getting that feedback from the customer back to us, to the technical team sitting here, to me, and yes, there was some gap. Just a second, let's go back: I think the art of creating a product is one part, but the second part, given that I, I don't think, I think good product people are simply people who know how to listen well, and distill what the customer says into what's really needed. I mean, he can say he needs A, but in practice, do something completely different, and that will give him exactly the value he's looking for. And I think that's the part I really, really love about creating product, about building products. Because when you come with understanding, very, very broad understanding and experience in the field you're working in, you can often see the periphery, the surroundings, which is like the Chrome extension: the reason nobody had connected WhatsApp with Salesforce is that nobody thought to do it with a Chrome extension. They tried to do it with an API, they tried to do it with all kinds of hacks, automations and such,

Eyal David: [35:29] nobody realized Chrome. Something that sits on the browser? Yes. Tell me, what you're describing is the most different from the carts, right? Because here you're basically listening. Tell us, give some tips: when you interview a customer, when you listen to a problem, what are the things that jump into your head? Look, I think before a customer interview. Because you're saying, sorry for interrupting, you're saying, I come as prepared as can be, I sit, I learn this industry, I understand it inside out. In the case of sales it's also clear you know it very well. Is it something you know how to replicate across industries too? Ones you've touched less?

The pivot to WhatsApp security and compliance

Yanir Calisar: [36:03] Absolutely. Later on, what we did at Tuvis was, after 2022, when everyone was laying off and all the companies suddenly cut headcount and we were left with some customers who had left us. So we did a very, very serious pivot in the company and we took it, I mean, if everything we talked about before was customer experience and productivity and visibility for management, see what's being said on WhatsApp, we took it into the world of security. Yes, because how do you allow company employees to use WhatsApp on a channel that isn't secure, or isn't secure by the standards of the bank or the insurance company. Here comes the worry from earlier. So really, to create in them the... I mean, they know it, they just didn't think there was a solution for it, and suddenly we understood that wait, we can do an interesting pivot here that would answer it and reach into pockets

Eyal David: [37:09] that are much deeper. Let's just explain the problem: basically a lot of people use WhatsApp inside the organization, with no monitoring at all, that's what you're basically saying.

Yanir Calisar: [37:15] There's also no monitoring, and then there's a problem of compliance, of regulation: if you're a bank, you need, you must record every conversation you have with customers, and banks in the United States got hit with insane fines for this in recent years, hundreds of millions of dollars. That's one. On the other side, look, WhatsApp is, it's a very secure app, end-to-end encryption and so on. The problem is that there are also a lot of scams: great that it's secure, but if someone pops up on WhatsApp with a photo of your best friend and tells you, listen, my phone was stolen, any chance you could quickly transfer me such-and-such money on Bit, there's a good chance you'll fall for it. So that's one, and there are all kinds of policy standards and things like that about what you're allowed to send a customer on WhatsApp, credit cards, passwords and such, that there's no way to enforce, because WhatsApp, because of WhatsApp's encryption, all the security systems, all those security giants, have no answer for these things, and so the only option is to block access to WhatsApp. We really saw very, very big companies that completely block access to WhatsApp, because they're simply very afraid. Once we understood these things, and these were things thrown at us in sales processes before 2022, when a huge bank in Brazil comes and tells us, listen, we don't have access to WhatsApp, then for us in Salesforce we'd mark them as closed-lost and that's that. But suddenly we said, wait, let's change the technology a bit, let's add that cyber layer, the security layer, also put AI in there so we can detect in real time, oh wait, there's a scam here, or there's some pattern we've seen before and it's some spammer, things like that. On the other hand, instead of copying all the conversations with customers only to Salesforce, let's send it to some database, whatever compliance system you want, and then we started closing crazy deals.

Eyal David: [39:29] Because basically you started listening to very custom requests, if I understand. They probably started like that. Look, at first it was a trickle.

Yanir Calisar: [39:41] What we needed to do was sit down and connect all the dots. When we connected the dots we understood the problem we were solving, I mean, we were solving a problem we hadn't noticed we were solving. Exactly. And then security said, wait, there's a WhatsApp security problem here. Here we are solving the security problem too. Wait, but we, we're not recording the conversations in Salesforce. Suddenly we solved not just productivity, but now it's productivity, security and compliance.

Eyal David: [40:12] What you're describing to me is that in '22, when that bite really came, you actually took bigger bites of the cake. Exactly. A different cake, even.

Enterprise only: deals of 50 thousand dollars and up

Yanir Calisar: [40:20] We connected small bites that we took each time into a new product wrapper; we literally built three separate products on exactly the same technology. And I think the magic is that at that point we didn't have a product person; we had excellent product people before that. I think once we understood that, I really remember the period of weeks when we made a very, very big change in the company. We said OK, from now on we're going for big deals only, 50 thousand dollars and up. We're targeting only enterprises; gradually the small customers left us too, moved to alternatives that were good enough. And I remember it, when I went to the team I told them, friends, this is the vision from now on. And then they asked me, wait, but the product designer and so on. Now I'm already after a long time of digging through cyber security platforms like that, very big, complex, heavy, with customers, asking for a demo and so on. Listen, after many systems I've seen, enterprises love ugly systems in cyber security. It has to be ugly, it has to be hard, complex, messy, I mean, not messy exactly, but very dense. Yes, you need to understand it, and all kinds of things, and here you press the button and deploy and wait a quarter of an hour. It has to work, that's how it needs to look, because otherwise we're not playing in the big leagues.

Eyal David: [41:56] Crazy. Tell me, I want to ask you a few things. First, at that point, how much had you raised, how many employees were you, and what's the story with Tuvis?

Bootstrapping, an 11-million-dollar raise and the fall

Yanir Calisar: [42:06] So basically Tuvis started bootstrapped. For two years and a bit we ran bootstrapped, we were four people in the company. Around mid-2021 we reached almost a million dollars in revenue with more than 100 customers, and then we said OK, 2021 is a good time to raise money. We understood: four people who reached a million dollars ARR without money, without raising money. We understood that if we raised money we could do something very, very big.

Eyal David: [42:41] That's a dividing point, because in the end founders who raise money can build the plan

Yanir Calisar: [42:49] and say we need it for this and that, and we'll open offices and everything. Bottom line, it's the confidence to try things. I think that's what it gives you, given that it was also my first time raising money, my first time dealing with investors. We raised relatively fast, two weeks. We raised 11 million; Oren Zeev led the round. Oren Zeev is an amazing investor. Mainly, first, I think he's somehow always available, even though he works with a lot of startups that are much bigger and much more successful than you, but every time you need him he's there, and he knows how to open doors and whatever's needed. But on the other hand, I think the magic is that he simply invests in founders he says he knows he can let work, so he gives a lot of freedom and he's very much behind you as long as you're trying to do something. I think we were in that state of mind; it was hard for us at first, because going from being bootstrapped to suddenly having 11 million dollars to go spend. I think it's an interesting school, raising money and operating with fund money. You

Eyal David: [44:10] suddenly become very creative, not just in product but really in go-to-market and things. I think, like, because you understood you now need to return high returns, in '22 you knew how to spot that cyber opportunity, let's call it. I don't know if you'd have spotted it if it were just a business; you have a small business, well, not a small business at all I think, but a business without outside investment where you answer only to yourself, you might stick to something that works and say fuck it, I want to keep profiting from more customers of the same kind. Maybe because you were aiming for high returns you suddenly said, let's double down on cyber, we'll make ugly things but ones that bring in at least 50 thousand per contract.

Yanir Calisar: [44:53] Could be. I actually think it's the opposite, because in practice in the year since, a bit less than a year since we raised, I'd say ten months from the moment we raised onward, we spent a lot of money, a whole lot, mainly hiring people, and also marketing, which you described as not working, so we did marketing, suddenly we traveled to conferences, suddenly I met my partner, the Brazilian, for the first time, so suddenly we started pouring money. I think it totally moved things in the company, absolutely, it taught me a lot of things, it also gave us the courage to try things we couldn't do before, mainly. The pivot happened literally a minute after we understood that the money was going to run out and there was no way to raise money again. Let's stop everything. Unfortunately, we parted ways with almost half the company's people, we lost the million-dollar customer. All these things fell on us like that within a period of three months, everything, the sky fell on us in three months, and then we took the slap and said OK, stop everything, let's think about where we're taking this.

Eyal David: [46:14] So you could say that that period of ten months of craziness, let's spend money and try to grow at any cost

Custom development vs. product enhancement, and the Brazilian market

Yanir Calisar: [46:22] contributed to it? I think de facto, in the end, the moment we stopped and said wait, let's go back to being that company of ours that succeeded, that burned money in a controlled and more responsible way, not that we weren't responsible, they were responsible there, but you operate like a startup, and then we went back to succeeding. Today the company is very, very successful. I'm glad I asked that just to get that. So maybe tell us about the state of the company now. So today the company is very, very successful, we work with hundreds of customers. Is it still an extension, right? No. It actually became a desktop app, and we also see on-prem versions and all kinds of permutations. I think that... so today there are hundreds of customers, we do millions, many millions in ARR, and most of the operation is in Brazil. Today there's a development team here in Israel. I think one of the nice things, I mean, once we said we made that shift to enterprises only, we understood, I mean, we started analyzing what was slowing us down. One of the things we noticed is that many times they ask us for custom development and all kinds of customizations like that. Now, you have to be very, very careful when you're a SaaS company not to turn into a services company. That's the thing that scares me most, it's the opposite of B2B enterprise; services, I don't want to do services. And that custom development really held back our development a lot. You want to close a 300-thousand-dollar deal, but he demands some customization from you. And then the rule of thumb we developed is to examine every such custom development and say how can we, whether or how can we turn it into a product enhancement. What does that mean? It means that not only that Volkswagen or that Bank of Brazil benefits from this thing, but also more existing customers and more customers to come. And if the answer to that is yes, then let's do it. So the state of mind of development and of sales, the whole company changed from "we're not a services company" to "we're developing the product." What, did you lose deals because of that? Yes, I lost deals because of that. I think those are deals that, in a way, it's good I lost. Because a customer who wants, I don't know, a customer who, excuse the expression, abuses Salesforce to save a few shekels there, and wants me to change half my product so it works with the... OK, that's a good example. Yes, so fine, I don't want that customer, and yes, there weren't many, but there were customers where I consciously said, friends, I don't want this deal, it's not a good deal. Among other things, because on that measure of theirs, Product Enhancement or Customer Development, it fell more on the Customer Development side. Tell me, and what do you have to say about the Brazilian market? I really, really love it when founders come to me and ask me all kinds of questions, trying to invent things, and I tell them, listen, there's a standard. There are standards in the industry. I mean, you're not the first ones doing this. Probably you, I believe you won't be the last ones to do it. Look at what the standard is and follow the standard. Because there's a reason that's the standard: people tried to do it, and they failed or succeeded, and if they succeeded, that's the standard. So there's a reason not many Israeli startups work in Brazil, because it's not a simple market. It's a crazy economy. It's like, I don't know, do you know the market? I know it well, yes. Listen, it's crazy, I didn't know its size, its potential. They need it so much, they need attention, and nobody gives them attention, and you come and you... And they really love to buy, and they have crazy challenges there, but they're hard to work with. You also didn't have a Brazilian entity at first, I assume. I didn't have a Brazilian entity, forget it, that's technical. It's technical: when you close a deal later, if we closed a deal with Telefónica, who really forced us, we don't work with foreign companies, so we opened an entity. But look, Brazilians are very, very gentle. You need to embrace them, talk with them, be patient, take them for two hours to an asado, eat meat, talk, ask about the family, about football and so on, and only then, in the end, do you do business. Now, again, that's not suited to our patience. One of the first things every employee who arrived, who joined the team, learns is what "tachles" means. Tachles, everything is tachles. Because we're like that, and now the Israeli team also talks with the team there, suddenly our technical team here in Israel gets on a call with a customer, customers get offended: how come he didn't ask me how I am, how come he didn't talk about Saturday's football. Those are exactly the things I also remember, hard, hard, hard, very hard. But look, in the end they're sweet, and there was a period... They know how to pay, you said that, right. They're looking for something to pay for.

Eyal David: [51:55] Nobody pays attention to them. So champagne, OK, bring the money.

Yanir Calisar: [52:02] But yes, but listen, in the end I think that's also one of the reasons Tuvis succeeded. Because there isn't much competition there. Let's say that if WhatsApp were popular in the United States, I'd have competition. It isn't. And doing business in Brazil is a whole production.

Eyal David: [52:27] Crazy. OK, now as we approach the end of the episode, I want to ask you, do you have a tip you can share with the listeners?

Yanir's tip: curiosity and proportion

Yanir Calisar: [52:36] Something that's really, really burning in you to share? Yes, sure, gladly. So I think my kind of technique for dealing with big things, interesting things I've done and do in my life, basically splits into two parts. That's curiosity and proportion. Curiosity is a trait, I think it's one of the strongest traits I have. It's what brought me to a lot of places in my life, to learn new things and pick up new hobbies and so on. So I think the more you develop curiosity and get exposed to more fields of interest and more interesting people, people who aren't the usual people you surround yourself with, I think that's a very, very important part of driving entrepreneurship on one hand, and building products, building new things, on the other. So simply learn as many fields of interest as possible and get exposed to as many things as you can in life. The second part is proportion. I think one of the interesting things I've been looking at in recent years is how people define, label all kinds of things in their lives. So for example, running a marathon: the first thing that comes to your head is it's hard, it's challenging, I'll get a knee injury. The word "hard" is an interesting word, because hard compared to what? Running a marathon; a year ago I did a ten-day Vipassana. So they told me, wow, that's hard. Compared to what? So once you put it in proportion like that, I mean, when you have nothing to put it in proportion against, I think it makes the way easier. And together with curiosity, it really drives, drove and drives me to do big and interesting things.

Eyal David: [54:35] I think that's my tip. That's an excellent tip. Develop curiosity and look at everything in proportion. Excellent, excellent, excellent. It's an excellent tip, especially waking up at 5 in the morning, it gives great proportion, starting the day like that. Yanir, so great that you came, it was fascinating. We'd love you to come next year and tell us where the company actually is, the one we haven't talked about here at all. It was really lovely. Just, how do people get in touch with you? You can email, you can connect on LinkedIn. LinkedIn first. Yalla, so there you go. Look me up. Yalla, bye bye. Bye bye. Hi friends, thanks for listening. If you found this podcast valuable, you can subscribe and follow us, of course, for more episodes on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or any other app. Of course, if you didn't find us on some app, I'd love for you to write to us. We'd really appreciate five stars on every platform and for you to follow us, so more listeners can discover us and find the podcast. You can also find previous episodes on any app or on the YouTube channel, we have links in the description. So until next time, yalla, be efficient, and bye bye.