It Shouldn’t Be That Hard

It Shouldn’t Be That Hard

Tim Fitzpatrick
Welcome to the Rialto Marketing podcast. Today's episode is a Revenue Acceleration Series interview where we talk to seven-figure B2B business owners and their growth-focused executives who are actively trying to grow their business and get to the next level. We talk about the good, the bad, and the ugly so that you can learn from their experience. Hi, I am Tim Fitzpatrick with Rialto Marketing, where we believe marketing shouldn't be difficult, and it definitely shouldn't be guest work. Thank you so much for taking the time to tune in. I am super excited to have Aaron McReynolds from Alysio with me today. Aaron, welcome, and thanks for being here.

Aaron McReynolds
Thank you, Tim. I appreciate it.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, I'm excited to dig into this with you today. Before we jump into the heart of the interview, I want to ask you a few rapid fire questions if you're ready to jump in.

Aaron McReynolds
Let's do it.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Okay, man. So very quickly, what do you do? How long have you been doing it?

Aaron McReynolds
Yeah, so I've been doing it for just over two years. Seed Stage Company. We are the revenue command layer. So we're tackling the problem of revenue security, which we believe is the last unanswered problem within go-to-market, which is all of your data lives in silos, your teams live in silos. Can we sell all of that data together for you and provide all the risks and vulnerabilities that exist that ultimately lead to misforecast, reproductivity issues, retention churn, et cetera?

Tim Fitzpatrick
So you're basically... All the revenue data you're collecting, managing, and keeping secure in a nutshell. Is that right?

Aaron McReynolds
Yeah, that's absolutely right.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Got it. Okay. I love it, man. What's the most important lesson you've learned? I mean, you're two years in to a startup, a lot of things going on. What's your most important learning lesson so far?

Aaron McReynolds
Yeah, I definitely say that everyone talks about it, but how vital the right team is. I think we made some phenomenal hires in the early days, made a couple that weren't as good. And then I've got back to this place of almost just setting this incredible standard of we only want the best of the best. I think sometimes when you're a startup, you have that, we just need to get people. Hopefully, people will take a chance on us, and then you get to a point where it's like, No, we have something good, we know the value, and we only want the best. For me, it's making sure you have the right team in place always and not cutting any corners on those decisions.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. Well, especially early on, you need to hire, right? You need certain positions filled, But, man, if you got the wrong person in that seat, gosh, you can't move forward. In some cases, it actually pulls you back.

Aaron McReynolds
Absolutely. I think back to we were hiring a few sales reps in the earlier days. We felt like we got product market fit. Let's go accelerate. I've been a sales rep for 10 years. I've been doing a lot of interviews. I think we always had that anxious feeling in the back of our minds of like, this is not fully proven yet. It's been founder-led sales to this point. I think we probably went out and got less experienced reps than we probably needed for the complexity of product at the time. And so I would just say, hire the right people. And one thing we always talk about is you have to earn the scale. I think startups often think, I got to grow the team, I'm going to grow the team. We're trying to now get to a point where we will only hire when that point is breaking or already broken. And then you go and you go and fix it. And so being able to earn that scale is something I wish we would have learned a little bit earlier.

Tim Fitzpatrick
So say that again. So it's earn the scale?

Aaron McReynolds
Earn the scale, yeah. Get to a point where you always say, oh, we know we need to go higher to sales reps. Perfect. And you follow this plan. We need a growth marketer at this stage. But I'm a big believer that in the startup realm, people can wear more hats than they would a regular job and a regular job description. And so if you think you need to hire someone, you only do it when you've earned the scale. And that scale is this person cannot physically, emotionally, mentally do that job anymore. And that demand is there enough that we've earned the scale.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, I love that. Man, We know to grow in a business is hard. Any mantra or something motivational you say to yourself or share with your team to push through those hurdles and roadblocks?

Aaron McReynolds
Yeah, it's funny. It started off probably as a joke in the early days. I'm not a developer. I don't come from a tech background. I've sold technology, but I don't code. And so when we started to hire out the dev team, I think I come in with this naive We can do anything mindset. Let's just go build it. We've retained that the whole ways. I have visions. I have ideas about what the product can be and what it can do. Our little mantra is, It shouldn't be that hard. It's just this inside joke that we always say whenever an idea comes up or making a product decision when we know it's going to be extremely hard. But we all just look at each other and we've talked about getting T-shirts printed with it on because we say it every single week. It shouldn't be that hard. That's enough of just a mindset shift. We can go do this. We know it's going to be hard. It's funny. My uncle was Head of Interior Design at Bentley. He started as an intern during college, and they had to get this production car ready for a Geneva Motor show. He went to the engineer's. He's like, Hey, I need the wood shape this way, and it needs to do this. They're like, You can't do that. He's like, Figure it out. We can do it. Pushed the team to be able to go and do that and did something that had never been done in the automotive industry. I think that story always stuck with me. I might not know if it's feasible or not, but if we want to go and do it, we'll figure out a way, and it shouldn't be that hard.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, that's a great one, man. I love that. So, Aaron, tell us about why and how you started Alysio.

Aaron McReynolds
Yeah. So I come from a sales background and had a phenomenal opportunity to sell it. Some incredible company, sold for Qualtrics, sold for Opta, sold for Lacework, actually started my career in sales at Goldman Sachs on the finance side and then moved into technology. And so I was selling for about a decade. And then for me, I'm fortunate enough that I was a founder that started a company, basically based on a personal pain point. And so we do what we had done in a spreadsheet at Vultrix back in the day. I left during COVID, everyone went fully remote, and I started to implement that same spreadsheet at the new companies that I went to, and it was the same problem we were trying to solve. And so I called my co founder, Ryan, who had worked with at Goldman Sachs and said, Hey, I've had this problem at Vultrix. It exists now. If it's a pain at these companies, it's got to be universal. Went out to the market I asked as many sales leaders as I could, is this something that if we build a solution, you would pay for and it would solve a problem? And the answer was yes. And so we got fortunate. I was still in a full-time job when we got our first round of funding. And when they send a term sheet, they're like, Hey, we need to quit your full-time job. Yes, next phone call. Obviously, I'm all in. I don't think that happens to everyone. I think some people say, I want to be an entrepreneur in college, and this is all I want to do. For me, it I had a personal pain point that became so great that we felt like we could go and solve it.

It Shouldn’t Be That Hard

Tim Fitzpatrick
That's awesome. I love it. And you mentioned this. I want to dig into this a little bit. You completed some pretty extensive interviews with sales leaders, chief revenue officers, rev ops people. I got a few questions around this because I think there's a lot to learn from this, but at what point in the company did you actually choose to do that?

Aaron McReynolds
Yeah, I think for the first version of the product, we did it, but it was almost we were just seeking validation. This is the idea, what do you think is great? And looking back on it now, I haven't done this for a number of years, I went to my friend and people who I've worked with. And looking back on it, they're probably not going to tell you the good, the bad, and the ugly, where they're going to tell you the good and go do it. And we're proud of you. We've just gone through this evolution of the platform, and we went out and found, I think we We ended up with like, 68, 70 RevOps and CROs, and none of them we knew before. And that was intentional. Out of the blue, hey, we're just seeking some feedback. We have this concept. Does it resonate with you? At the beginning of every call, we literally said, Don't sugarcoat this. If I want good news, I'll go and ask my mom. But it's saying, Tell us, does this actually solve your pain? Then what else are the biggest pain points that you with. And so we went through this motion. We took that feedback, we recorded every call, we ran the entire thing through ChatGPT. We let it give us feedback on what they had said. We did a two-hour internal session about all the feedback that we collected and we actually presented it to the rest of the team who hadn't been on those calls. Got another unbiased opinion on it. And I wish we would have done that day one. But I think it's a process that we are never going to stop doing it going forward.

Tim Fitzpatrick
So at that point, you had a minimum viable product. Is that right?

Aaron McReynolds
Yeah, we had a product. We had paying customers. Yeah, I've been live for about a year and a half.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Okay.

Aaron McReynolds
We had this concept of what the evolution could look like. And then before we wrote a single line of code, we went. Yeah.

Tim Fitzpatrick
So if you had to do it again, you'd do this process before you even started the MVP.

Aaron McReynolds
Is that right? Yeah. And I think benefit and blessing in the curse of because I lived a pain point, I knew what the product could look like and what it should do and how it solves the problem. And so I think at that point, it was just like, Hey, let's just go validate this. Got a few yeses. It's like, let's go build it. With this, it's such a unique concept and product that doesn't even exist in the market. And so to be able to build it, we had to say, what are the pain points you're living? How are you solving for them today? What's the gap? How much time do you spend on that? How many hires do you make to solve this problem? And so I think it gave us a unique opportunity where this feedback and this market research in a way was so valid and important before even jumping in and starting on the product.

Tim Fitzpatrick
So I want to break this down a little bit because a lot of people... This goes back to your, it shouldn't be that hard, right? A lot of people are I'm going to think about this and go, Oh, my God, 60 plus people? How did you... That's impossible. How do you even do that? But I think this is a lot simpler than most people think. How did you go about this process? How did you reach out to people?

Aaron McReynolds
Yeah. So we went into a data base, ran a search for CROs, VP of RevOps with organizations that had what we believed would be the ICP. And parameters. And we ran that search and then we went old school. We just went on LinkedIn, we DM them, we send them emails. Hey, looking for feedback on this product. Incredible career. We feel like it would resonate with you. Are you open to spending 15, 30 minutes with us just to review? And I think you always have that advantage of being cofounders that people will probably take that time to do that with you. But I would say 90 plus % of people that we ping go back to us in one way or another. Yeah, happy to do it. I don't have time. Happy to help down the line. I think what's incredible about that process is you are essentially selling at that point a product that doesn't exist. You're testing messaging that maybe doesn't exist. And even from the first interview to the 70th interview, the message, the positioning changed because we learned so much through every single interview of like, Okay, this is actually more what the pain problem is for CROs. And we've heard this now 10 times in a row. I think we can solve it this way. And so that evolution, just such an invaluable process for us.

You Have To Be a Bisionary

Tim Fitzpatrick
What did you learn as a whole through the process? What would you say to another founder of like, this is why you got to do this. This is what we took away from this process.

Aaron McReynolds
I would say, I think as founders, and I'm not going to speak to every founder, but a part of who are and what you have to be is visionary. You have to be able to see around corners. You have to be thinking in the future when everyone else is living in the here and now. And so oftentimes, we come up with these concepts or ideas that don't seem either realistic or something you should go and build an entire product around until you get that validation from 70-year-old people that say, This is what I've been trying to solve for every single day. I just didn't know it existed. And that to us is this micro product market fit just from the feedback alone. Then it evolves and you say, Okay, perfect. If we were to build it, would you pay for it? Will you pay for it? Will you be a design partner right now and get those commitments? We ended up getting 10 advisors from those interviews. People we met with that we were impressed with that aligned with the vision that said, This is what we need. We want to be part of the process. Can we help? So we actually added 10 official advisors just from this process as well, which going forward is going to be invaluable to us as a company, just purely based from product feedback as we go. We iterate introductions and thought leadership. I think it's going to be a big part of how we move forward, and we wouldn't have got that if we had to run this process. So I think you either do two things. You say, Hey, we want an advisory board. Let's go find 10 advisors, and hopefully you connect. But by doing it this way, we'd already told them the pain point, what we're solving for. They validated, believed in it, and now they're advised.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. And I would imagine, too, that through those interviews, you got a lot of messaging elements that you can use in their own words, right? And translating that over into how you position and talk about the product I'd imagine it really it drove that. Did you?

Aaron McReynolds
Yeah. I think about my career as a sales rep, we're always taught to sell to a pain, right? But most sales reps will get on a call and initially want to start talking about product features and functions and how we've helped other customers. And this is the value and here's the ROI. I think even in this process, you always have to flip it on on their head. That's almost like if you're a doctor, someone comes in and says, I got toothache, and you jump straight to cancer. It's like, what? You've missed the whole entire point. And you're trying to make a recommendation without understanding the true pain. And so even within this process, We tried to not talk about what we were building in the product and what we thought we wanted to build and just tried to really articulate what is the number one pain for CROs and RevOps leaders across a group 70 that we can then say, okay, if it's this pain point with these people, can we go and expand that and it be relevant? And so I think trying to uncover their pain first before telling them what we think the solution is going to be, it changes the messaging. And I think that's what messaging is at the end of the day is not what do we do? It's we understand your pain point is that solution and how we think we solve it. And here's who we solved it for. Like I said, the messaging, the way we want to position the product, we believe it's an entirely new category. And going out and creating a category is not an easy thing to do. And so instead of basing the entire product around the category, we base the product around what the product does within the category that people don't even know exists yet. But as that messaging comes out, it's like, actually, I didn't put these two things together, but that is what I've been trying to solve for 20 years. It's just never been articulated. And then the layer on top of that is, and here's the product that we've built that actually goes and solves that pain problem for you. So, yeah, the messaging, the positioning continues to evolve as the process goes on.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. I love it, man. So much to learn from that. And man, if most people took the time to do that, it's just absolutely invaluable. And it's It's going to steer you away from pitfalls that you would have otherwise gone into.

Aaron McReynolds
Correct.

Raising Money through Seed Funding

Tim Fitzpatrick
I love it. So let's talk about raising money. You've raised money through pre-seed seed rounds How did you do this? How did you go about it? What have you learned in the process that others might be able to glean from that?

Aaron McReynolds
Yeah. I think first and foremost, I have such respect for every founder So that's ever raised money. We know the odds of raising capital, and we know that raising capital isn't for everybody. I think I also have this really soft spot for technical founders that go out and raise because to me, raising is a sales process. A lot of these technical founders have never sold. And so when we decided, we thought we had a good idea, we felt like it did need venture capital be successful so that we could have the speed that we need to go and execute. We ran it like a sales process. We did cold outreach. We asked for referrals, introductions. If I look back at the first VC meeting we took when we pitched and what we were asking for, we didn't understand the process at all. But we learned from that very first pitch and then went and refined the entire deck after one pitch because we knew how far off we were from what we were trying to go and do. And so I think we met a phenomenal lady, Kat Kennedy, sits on our board now. She's part of a large fund here in Utah. And she said, Hey, very interested in this. Here's an individual we think you should go and talk to if they validate it. We're in, and that individual ended up changing the course of our trajectory. They were interested, they invested, they invited their friend to participate in the round, they invited in our first institutional money into the round, and That is essentially what gives the conviction to go, could the jobs go all in on this and continue to run that same process? But I think the piece that most people don't talk about is like, you'll see online the way that we position it. It's like, oh, We did a pre-seed round, then we had a pre-empted seed round, and it just looked so easy on the internet, right? All these press announcements that come out. But behind the scenes, we have an Excel spreadsheet of over 80 different investors that we either emailed or cold-called or asked for introductions to, and we ran it like a sales process. I know all too well the odds of cold calls connecting and emails being open and then responding. We just went back and just said, Okay, let's just run the most tight-knit process we can in the way that we would sell a product and do that with the VCs. Then in every meeting we had, it's like, Hey, if it doesn't resonate, is there any fund you think this would resonate with? We always say, We're not a perfect fit, but here's who is. I think that was probably one of the biggest learning lessons in the fundraise process is not all firms are created equal. They don't all have the same thesis. They don't all have the same check size. They don't all want to be in AI technology yet. I think being able to figure out, am I talking to the right fund, first of all? And then even within every fund, every single investor is going to have a different thesis of their own or where they focus. And so you could spending time trying to knock down the door to get in with someone just because they're at a fund that you like, only to meet with them and realize they focus on health care. And you just wasted their time and your time, and that might be a one-shot. So I'd say, there are ways you can do the research, look at companies they've invested in before. Do they sit in the area that you're in? And then also to that point, if they have, you might not want to talk to them if they've invested in your competitor. And so some funds I know will do that, and most will not. And so even having that research into how these funds operate could have saved a lot of time the first time around.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. So the first thing that you said really resonated with me where we were like, when we initially did this, we stumbled. But you learn from each pitch and you just continually make it better and better. Just little improvements here and there make a huge difference. The other thing that really stuck with me, too, was it seemed like once you pushed through and got that first investor, not that it became easier, but you started to build momentum there and things started to compound from there. Because one investor who wanted to invest knew somebody else, right? Like, Hey, you should probably... You might be interested in this, right? And then it just built from there. So just taking time and having that diligence to just keep pushing, keep pushing until you've knocked over that first big domino was a big deal for you.

Aaron McReynolds
Yeah. I think a lot of first time founders and we were the same way. And understanding that there's this concept of a lead investor is smaller funds that want to do smaller checks that take these signals from the larger funds. It's like they're in, we're in, or we have conviction as well, but we write smaller checks That's that fill rounds. I've seen far too often in the ecosystem, people say, I'm going to go out and fundraise. They land four or five smaller funds that are really excited to participate, but they will not do anything until there's a lead investor. And then if you've filled out the round with these smaller checks and then you go and try and get a lead investor, there might not now be room for their usual check size. And so you're going to disqualify funds based on not having enough room in the round because you filled it with these a lot of checks. And so my advice is always like, go get the lead investor first. One, the minute you do that, it's a better signal. You can go fill the round easier. But if you don't leave enough room, you're going to push people away before the end of the process.

Speeding Up the Sales Process

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, it's fascinating, man. So in the pre-interview, we talked about this a little bit. You're anticipating what 6-9 month sales cycle is because a lot of what you're doing is focused on enterprise clients. What are you doing to speed up the sales process? And honestly, it seems like no matter who I talk to in B2B, everybody wants to speed up the sales process. So how are you guys approaching that?

Aaron McReynolds
Yeah, I think we say the 6-9 months because we do focus on enterprise organizations. There's always going to be a more formal sales process that exists at the enterprise. Leaders have more scrutiny, securities, not the person that you're talking to in the end through a sales process at SMV sometimes. And so I think that 6-9 month is like a blanket safety period that we feel is pretty much expected within any enterprise sales process. But even since you and I spoke, We had an entire session sitting down, and it was that. It's like, scrutinize the sales process. How can we make this even faster? And good news is, we've actually gotten to a point where we've almost created a self-serve element to the new product for the enterprise. And so that 6-9 months might be 6-9 clicks now and building the top of the funnel in ways that we hadn't done before. And so I think when you ask that question of how long is the sales process? Every founder, every VP of sales should continue to scrutinize that. And even thinking about my own career when I started at Qualtrics, we have pretty quick sales cycles. And then I went to Optin and I jumped into the enterprise. And these were true enterprise sales cycles. And one of the things I pushed myself to do was to ignore the noise and try and run my process like I had always done, which was, Hey, nice to meet you. Can we meet tomorrow? And that doesn't happen in the enterprise, but I could do that at Qualtrics. And I started to apply that to my sales process when I joined a new company. And it's incredible how often sales reps It's just fall into the status quo. You onboard, they ask, What's our standard sales process? You say 6-9 months, they're going to run that sales process like it's 6-9 months. But why can't it be 3-4 months? Is there any reason why it can't be? And of course, there's going to be ones that take even longer, that happens. I found 5K deals can take as long as million dollar deals and vice versa. And it's just all about how you run your process and making sure you're aligned with their expectations and how they run sales process and finding out as much information early within the sales cycle. Mutual action plans is something I live and die on. Hey, this is how we run the process. Does this align with you? Let's have signatures and expected dates, and then you're both aligned. And that can change it from 6-9 months to 3-5 if you need.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. So really tightening up the sales process wherever you possibly can. But then also... Are you finding... One of the things that I think would probably be a big hurdle for people is, Okay, we're going to implement this new system. How much work is that? And how many other people are we going to have to get involved? Do you find the tighter and simpler you can make onboarding and implementation? Does that help shorten the cycle as well?

Aaron McReynolds
Yeah. Coming from an enterprise sales background. A platform like after the implementation is so large that you have third parties do the implementation. You pay for that implementation, and it's expected of how long that process takes and you know you're going to have to pay a percentage of the contract value to get the thing up and running. And with this evolution of the platform, we said, Hey, how do we flip that on its head? How do we make this two-step process to be onboarded? I think the evolution right now of what AI is allowing us to do from a data integration standpoint, I think there's a new level of trust and fear that exists with AI that we haven't had before. We knew how SaaS applications work, how long they took to onboard the process that went through. With AI, it's this process right now of like, Hey, we can actually get this turned on in 30 minutes, and you'll start to see value. The buyers often have this fear of like, Well, I don't trust it. That's not how products have always worked. We went from CD-ROMs to have software, and you go and put on in every computer you have in the organization. Then we got this era of SaaS, and now this era of AI is just the speed at which we can sell. To be able to go and pay $20 to sign up for ChatGPT and literally have what I see as the Oracle of the world just at your fingertips, it's I didn't talk to a single person. They're not to implement anything. And it's all right there. We've taken, I'd say, inspiration from a product like that. How do we apply that to our own business and our own sales process? But the technology is affording us to do that.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah, it's awesome. I know you guys are focused a lot on reaching revenue milestones for additional funding. What next round would be Series A, is that right?

Aaron McReynolds
Yeah, correct.

Tim Fitzpatrick
And you've got about an 18-month runway. What's your current plan to accomplish that?

Aaron McReynolds
Yeah, I think it's funny. You talk to some funds, people are investing Series A with no revenue. People are investing Series A at $30 million of revenue. And so, again, going back to the earlier talk track about who you talk to when you're trying to raise, you have to understand those pieces. But for us internally, we have a revenue goal that we want to go and hit. We know how to get there. And I think it's going to be a heroic effort to get to the dollar value that we want to get to. We understand the scope and magnitude of the product that we're trying to build. And for better or for worse, it takes venture capital to go and have the success with it. And so we want to give ourselves the best opportunity to have the best valuation to give the company the best success that we can. So everyone internally knows those goals, what we need to do to get there. Like I said, you wear many hats. And so it's having Tom, who's a head of product, actually be our head of customer success as well. It was never in the job description. It doesn't actually align, but he's really good at it, and he's been doing it for a year and he'll continue to do it. And Until we own the scale that Tom can't handle the onboardings. That all goes into that revenue success story. It's like you can sell a product, you have to retain the customers. They have to be happy. That piece is almost as hard as the initial sale. And So while we have these revenue milestones, to us, it's more important. Like a customer is renewing, are they upselling, or they find value in the platform? That's what we care about. And some will and some won't. We know that. But how do we give ourselves the best opportunity to deliver as much value as we can? So to me, the revenue, the benchmark, we have a number, but there's so much that goes into that. Even for what we do, you might go get one or two enterprise logos, and that's as good as 250 SMV logos. And so we try not to put this hard and fast on we're not going to raise until we get to this point. We're having conversations right now about the Series A. We got 18 months of runway, and it will come when it comes. But that's not the primary focus right now. It's building the best product we can, getting the value to customers as quickly as possible.

Tim Fitzpatrick
But if I'm hearing you right, Aaron, some people at this stage, and depending on the type of product it is, maybe many hundreds of clients, that's not where you guys are. And so it's, I guess from that standpoint, it definitely makes the plan simpler. I love how you brought in here, Hey, it's not just the new clients. We need to focus on retention as well, right? Because if you lose people, then you got to get that many more on the front-end, right? But it's not... I mean, how many new clients is it? Is it a couple, handful of potential enterprise clients?

Aaron McReynolds
Yeah. I mean, at the enterprise space and where we envision the pricing of the product to be, that is a couple of logos. We're fortunate for the stage that we are when we I tell investors right now who our customers are, they're impressed by the logos that we have. And so I think when we got the seed round preempted, it was because of that. We were able to go and sell mid-market enterprise logos with a freshly baked product. And it just says, Hey, the pain is real. If these enterprise companies are seeing that pain, we know it's going to resonate across the board. And so I think if you're playing the enterprise play, that's how it goes. It's like, Hey, go land one or two enterprise logos. You can go and replicate that. And I think investors love the enterprise talk track. It's three-year contracts. It's predictable revenue. We also have the opportunity with this evolution of there's an element to PLG. It solves a pain point for an individual rep. And so we might be telling almost two stories there. We got two enterprise logos, and we got a thousand sales reps on the platform. So I'm pretty excited about that.

Tim Fitzpatrick
So you're... I mean, because you need such a small number, are you guys taking more of an account-based marketing approach where it's just like, Hey, within this enterprise, Whatever. These are the 5-10 people we need to start connecting with. Is that how you approach it?

Aaron McReynolds
Yeah. I mean, if you were to join us as a sales rep tomorrow and you got your book to go and sell from, the entire company, our book is about 500 accounts right now because we've narrowed down the ICP as tight as we can, which I think is a really important thing to do. Every single company that's within that 500 list fits the ICP perfectly. So one phone call that hits, one email that hits, one demo that works. We know what the conversion opportunity looks like. But again, being an enterprise sell, one customer might take nine months, might take twelve months. It might take us all the way to the end of our runway of 18 months, depending on who it is and how large it is. But that's the world that we're in. We believe that's where the product resonates. And so that's what we need to do as a company. This is not going to resonate with everyone. I know that, but that's our strategy.

Conclusion

Tim Fitzpatrick
Yeah. I love it, man. Aaron, thank you, man. This is tons of good stuff here. One last question before we wrap up. Knowing what you know now, anything you would do differently?

Aaron McReynolds
Yeah, I think I would say have more conviction from day one, right? I think being a first-time founder, and we have this little slack group of first-time founders within the Utah community, and we go to lunches and we will talk about it. You're crying on each other's shoulders like this is so hard. Hardest thing anyone will ever do. And I think you have to be a little bit crazy to want to do it. But to say, Hey, you've taken that lead. Have conviction in every decision and every move that you make from day one. And even if it's wrong, I go and learn from it. And I think we do a horrible job of talking about failures on social media, LinkedIn, especially. It's all just praise and see around announcements and everything's all roses. But behind the scenes, we're all trying to learn from each other's favors. We have this safe space where we can share with each other what is working and what is not working. If this chat got out in the open, everyone I think would be pretty surprised. But that's the reality of what we're doing. And so I just say to have more conviction that we're doing the right thing and making the right choices earlier to double down when things are right.

Tim Fitzpatrick
It's awesome, man. Well, I certainly wish you nothing but the best of luck as you continue down this path and hope you continue to get a bunch of traction. Where can people connect if they were?

Aaron McReynolds
Alysio.ai is our website. And LinkedIn, Aaron McGReynolds, and I obviously work for lysio. So I would love to connect. I try and respond to as many DMs as I can on LinkedIn. So I'll do my best.

Tim Fitzpatrick
Cool. We'll make sure all that stuff gets in the show notes. Thank you again for sharing your journey so far. Tons of good stuff that people can learn from no matter what they're trying to do. So thank you again. Those of you that are watching, listening, appreciate you as well. If you want to connect with us, you can do it over at rialtomarketing.com. The other tool we've got for you is over at revenueroadblockscorecard.com. We help clients build their engine. We focus on nine key areas for their marketing engine. And if you want to know which of the nine are slowing down your growth, that's where you can do it. And thank you again. Until next time. Take care.