How Innovatemap Helped Clients Raise Over $1B in Capital with a Product-First Approach (Interview with Executive Christian Beck)

Introduction and Credibility: $1B in Client Capital Raised

Christian Beck

00:00Appreciate you all. This this slide title, I have I have problems with because it's a little bit misrepresentative of of how I think about SaaS, but it is true. So it's a credibility builder. We worked with a lot of companies to help them raise a billion in capital. But the way that I think about this is a bit different than it than it may seem from that perspective. And and the reason why is because my background

00:25is in design. So I was a product designer at Autodesk and a Primo, which is a marketing tech company, built a design team there. I worked with agencies on the side to help with design, and I hated my experience with pretty much all of them. So I did maybe the best thing or the worst thing that I could have done, which is cofounded an agency ourselves. So what I found when we were working in software

00:56do

01:01And And And

01:08So spinning up companies got cheap, switching got easier, it changed the competitive landscape for software companies. And we thought at that time, was a way to do it. So when I say product, you often think of product management, but it's more than that from from our perspective. It's really anything around what makes software easier to buy and what makes it easier to use. So on the buy side, we think about product marketing, messaging, and brand, and

01:36the logo, visual identity, how you speak to your customers. So to opportunity

Background: Christian Beck's Design Career and Founding Innovatemap

Christian Beck

01:43about

01:48're

01:50grow pre seed through the series our a or those that are that are that are bootstrapped, maybe under 10,000,000 ARR, pretty much anytime you might need help before you bring these roles in house. So what I wanna talk about today is going to be a little bit out of the numbers because numbers is not my expertise. I'm a designer by trade. I oversee sales and marketing now, but that has really sort of given me an elevated

02:17perspective on how I see product helping companies. Because as I've tried to sell innovatemap services, I work a lot more with founders who are also fish out of water selling their own product in ways they weren't ever experienced to do that as well. And there's some common things that I find people miss. So even if you are drinking the product Kool Aid and you understand the value of product, there's there's little mindset shifts that I'm going

02:42to try to give you some backdrop today that hopefully ends in something tangible, but you can go think about with your own product or your own company as you're working on it. And the three things that I think about when when we, innovatemap, talk about a product first approach is thinking about product as an investment. Product is design centered, and product should also be vision led. So I'm gonna break those down a little bit using an

03:07example of a couple companies that we've worked with over the past three years. But first, let's lay the groundwork. This is an overly simplified graph, but a lot of times I feel like founding teams or the founders have three main buckets of work if you're raising capital. If you're not, pitching maybe doesn't become an issue, but you're really just focusing on building the product, selling it, and pitching it to get investment. But then there's this sliver

Who Innovatemap Serves: Pre-Seed to Series A SaaS Companies

Christian Beck

03:33of product as you put it there. And even if you believe in product, the reason why I put it in here is it feels like a time suck for you. Something that I've got to do to get my vision out in the world. But the reality is that product, from my perspective, should be thought of as an investment and not an expense. So if I were to shift this graph around, I would put product at the

03:55core of it. And it's not just this pie, it is the slice of the pie that you're worried about, but it's something that's going to scale everything else that you're gonna do. And I think that this is the thing that gets lost. So if you're a CTO in here, you're working with CTOs, products should be making your job easier. It should scale what you do. If you're selling, I was talking to some salespeople this morning. I

Product as Investment vs. Expense: The Core Mindset Shift

Christian Beck

04:16one of the first experiences that I had as a designer working with clients through innovatemap was working with sales team and watching them click through sales demos of horribly designed products and how they would just excuse away all the bugs or all the poor navigation flows. And it dawned on me that great salespeople often don't realize how bad their product is because their charisma and just sales skills help them sell anything. But the reality is if

04:42the product is designed well, you're designing the right features and they're workflow oriented, it's a lot easier to sell. And then, of course, from the pitching perspective, we'll get to that in a little bit, but I know there's a lot of people bootstrapping, and I'm not here to make any claim on what's better fundraising or not. Doesn't really matter from my perspective, but I think at some point, you will be pitching it. Even if it's not

05:02for investment, you may be pitching it to an executive that you wanna hire. So product also helps there. So that's the first core shift that I hope people to make is product is expensive, but it's an investment. And I'll show you a little bit more what that means when we look at this company Authentics, which I'm pressing the palm tree. Sorry. There we go. There's a palm tree logo. I don't know what that means. Okay. Authentix,

Authentix Case Study: From $500K to $10M ARR

Christian Beck

05:28an indie based company working in health care technology. They help health care leaders analyze customer interaction data. They have AI that reads and helps create models that helps them handle customer support. So think like insurance companies, payers, anything involved in healthcare. So I use this. I I've sort of simplified the numbers here to just make the point that I wanna make here. When we started working with Authentix in 2019, they were right around 500 k in

05:58ARR. When they started working with our team on the product side, we were revamping their product. So it was a this like pseudo low code solution, but they had brought on this CTO to start revamping it and build a legitimate product. So we were designing the product. They also had a visual identity that was just cobbled together, and it wasn't telling the right story. So when they hired us, 500 k ARR, when you look at 100

06:24k cost of working to fix all those, it feels like a lot. That's 20% of what you're gonna make in a year that you're about to spend on something that may not give you demonstrable results. It's really hard to resist getting some SDRs or investing in anything that doesn't give you revenue right away. But when we look out, we've worked with Authentix I guess it's been about three and a half years now. So they were pre

06:47seed when we started. They're now just raised their series b. And I think all told, in the roles that I've described with product, there's been more costs that I'm I'm not covering on the product side, on the customer support side, or on the product engineering side, sales and marketing and all that. But just on the product, brand, product marketing, UX, product management, they spent about 500 k, but they're about 10,000,000 in ARR. So when you look

07:12at the the scale in terms of revenue versus the scale in terms of cost, you can start to see that it's more of an investment. And I don't I again, not a numbers guy. I don't think in terms of valuations, but I think it's the best sort of hallmark to show the value of that type of work. Now I'm not gonna say that product was the only reason they're 50 x their valuation, but you can see

07:33how when you take these numbers together, what starts out feeling like a really painful cost for something that's not gonna give you immediate return, over the course of years, it starts to compound in terms of the value of your company. So what do we mean when we talk about investing in product? So when we look at Authentics, visually, you can look at the logo on the left and the one on the right and see, obviously well,

07:56hopefully, it's obvious it's an improvement. Through this process, we did a lot of things. We threw out names. I think Archer was one of the names we threw out we're we're

08:08that. Able to

08:16And we don't have any ego about what we do. We didn't get upset that they didn't pick any of the creative names we had. This fit. We lowercased the c because that's what people do, and it's really cool. And we did a new logo. But looking brand.

08:35Brand.

08:41At And And going the the brand. Do

08:50we're to

08:53we're that.

08:57As well and see the brand reflected there. But in this space, they're selling in a am I on the no. Sorry. I keep pressing a different green button. I'm sorry. There we go. That's the slide I meant to be on. So when when we when we look at the the niche sort of industry oriented SaaS trade shows, things like that sort of place. So you look at their salespeople there on the left. They're selling this brand

Brand as a Scaling Asset: Talent and Trade Shows

Christian Beck

09:22that they buy into. So on that side, you say brand also is is is not just to connect with the customers, but it's eventually how you're gonna scale your company. When they started working with us, it's about 13 employees. They're at about 85 today. And the only way that they compete in the market is to have a brand that people wanna go work for and go post up at a trade show behind this booth. And then

09:43on the right, when you look at the CEO speaking, you can see that the authenticity

09:49able do we're we're we're

09:56able to And

10:04do

10:12it, we're it, it,

10:18but it's also been built. So this is how it's working. So when you look at something like this, UX is really easy to see when there's a clean UI that the charts look really great and the colors look great. See how how we

10:42And so how how put into their position of how they're can supporting a broader product. This is a lot easier to demo because people can actually navigate it like a user would navigate the product itself. But when we also think about investing in UX for long term success, this is a screenshot of the Figma file that's that's that's supporting what you just saw. So this is a click through on the mobile side. But when you look

11:08in Figma, the reason why I put this up here, if you look on the right side, you can see there's HTML, there's CSS that the engineers are using to make sure that everything is consistent. If you look on the left side, there's a design system that's supporting everything with intuitive naming conventions. These are things that we don't talk about a whole lot when we think about product and investment. But as I've watched teams scale over time,

11:30this makes engineering's job a ton easier. The consistency in UI reduces customer support tickets. Earlier, we heard about usability and the importance of that. We just heard about customer support. But when we think about that, if you're designing things well and you're designing it in the right system and communicating it to engineering, what feels like an investment upfront pays off down the road because everything moves a lot faster down down the road. The last main point

UX and Design Systems: Engineering Efficiency at Scale

Christian Beck

11:59that I wanna that I wanna give you when I think about what it means to invest in product is the idea that you never stop selling the vision. Now whether we have founders in here or not, this applies to everybody. There's the original sort of we make the vision. We're gonna go sell this vision either to investments or to get people to join the team, and then we just sort of move on from that. This is

12:21a company barometer that we're working with on their podcasting ad spend platform, and this is what it looks like in the build right now. This is not what we designed. But this is what it looks like. This is what they're demoing. It's just engineering forward. It's literally getting engineered and then just put up in a staging environment, and then they're demoing that. And they've lost the vision side of what they're doing to their customers because they're

12:42proving what the product can do, but they've forgotten that people and customers themselves need to get excited and they need to see themselves in it. So this is deliberately not a vast departure from what you just saw, but it's more user centered. There's design that's involved in this redesign of the product, and they're building this now. But my point in bringing this up to you right now is they're not waiting for this to be built before

Never Stop Selling the Vision

Christian Beck

13:06they take it in front of customers. And I think that's a really subtle mistake that a lot of people make is once you get the product built, you start sharing the builds and products. And you have poor sales engineers messing around with a staging environment that's down when they're on-site somewhere and they're clicking around or something doesn't work, it's not wired correctly, use designs. In Figma, there's absolutely no excuse not to be using clickable prototypes when

Barometer Case Study: Selling with Figma Prototypes

Christian Beck

13:31you're selling because you can also sell a more compelling vision that way. I think there's a negative connotation that we've had in the past of vaporware, which is sort of has a connotation to say that we're going to sell something we can't back up. But that actually is a really useful tactic when you're selling the vision because you're actually selling ahead of what you can build. You already know that you can build it. You've committed to

13:51build it. Sell the vision to people instead of the actual product. Oh, I don't have okay. Alright. So the last thing I wanna leave you all with is how can you implement a product first So we're to going

14:12that.

14:18That.

14:22Sort of exercise. Able to There And is supposed to be a video playing here, but it's not. But just imagine a really compelling UI video there. Got it? Yeah. That's what was there. Okay. So how might we put brand to work inside the product? I I showed this a little bit, but I think there's this weird and not to get too touchy feely about brand, but it's this sort of thing that kind of exists as an

14:51asset to the team. It's an asset to a sales team. It's an asset to a product team. And we see that a lot with product led growth where you see personality that comes through in the product. But I wish more people would actually think about if we had this top level brand that sets the expectation, how do we make that work for us inside the product? Think about a restaurant where that has amazing food but has

15:12terrible service or has amazing food but has a really bad decor inside the dining room. When we talk about brand, it's

15:21model, model. And

15:27looking

15:31And how might we utilize research to identify features to build for long term success? So a lot of times people just get really stuck on the roadmap that they set out to build, and they don't abandon it fast enough. I don't really ever work with a client beyond three months on a road map because so many things can change. There's an art to it. There's also a science to it, and you don't want to be the

Ongoing Research and Flexible Roadmaps

Christian Beck

15:53motorcycle jerking around. You need to be you need to have the right vehicle and stay in your lane a little bit, but you also need to be flexible enough to shift, and you need to be doing ongoing research. So a lot of times people do this initial research where they use it to inform the product, and then they kind of stop doing it. And you even see it in the market, you don't see a lot of

16:13companies hiring user researchers, or you see companies that hire product managers with no research background. Just understand that research itself should be constantly utilized. Every time you put something into the market, you've changed the variables. That's the most unscientific thing about product is that you have this scientific mindset that I I will make something work if I put it in. But the second your product is being used, you've changed all the variables. So you have to

16:38constantly get more input that's fed back into the product.

16:43Lastly, how might we sell our vision based on our future product? If you're not using a designer now, you should be using a designer. And when I say designer, I say a product designer, somebody that's more UX minded and less marketing design. Marketing design is usually pretty boxed into executing marketing campaigns, and a lot of them will throw the title of UI designer on their title. But when you're talking about designing workflow oriented product, we're talking

Leveraging Product Designers Across Sales and Engineering

Christian Beck

17:09about somebody that has a design background. But they should be leveraged by the sales team just as much as the engineering team. When I was at Autodesk, I couldn't name a salesperson. We weren't in the same building. We didn't work in the same ZIP code, same area code, and it drove me crazy as I realized that there are salespeople out there that are selling product that's poorly designed and the designer doesn't know it, and the salesperson

17:31is not telling the designer. That can be solved. And I saw that towards the end of my time at Autodesk by starting to send my mock ups to the sales team themselves so that they could sell off of that rather than waiting for the built product that they could go demo. So think about how can you continue to drive the vision forward with design and product resources that lives outside of the product development life cycle. So

17:54those are some three takeaways for you all. I know there's a lot to this mindset, but hopefully some of these are some got you thinking about different ways that you can see how you can lead with product in your world. And you can scan this. I've got my badge on. You can scan that as well later, but I'm happy to talk to more people. We have thirty three seconds if there's a really fast question.

Q&A: Figma Prototypes vs. Real Product Demos

Nathan Latka

18:24Yes. Said MiGMA prototype. Do you recommend building that to show to the clients quickly or building just a real product? Yes. That screenshot that I showed with Barometer, they increased their sales by 300% in a month by just switching over. I mean, literally just stopped showing the product and showed the screens that they're going to build.

Christian Beck

18:53No. That's a great question. In this case, there's going to be a delay before they get implemented. They've got to do a lot of data cleanup to get them on the platform so they have the time. But I think it is a great tactical question. If you are going to do that, you have to have a really good dialogue with the customer to let them know, like, what's coming. Salespeople are terrible terrible than that. Yeah. Well,

19:12I mean, that's why you gotta have them talk to the designers more often. But, yeah, I mean, the salesperson's gonna get that contract signed, but I see people do it a lot. I think there's ways that it can be handled. I think salespeople are sometimes gonna make commitments that can't be backed up, but that's not what we're saying here. We're basically saying they're going to be they're going to be demoing things that there has that.

Nathan Latka

19:38So that. That. We're we're to

Christian Beck

19:46going But it's really having them mock up what is yet to come. Thank you all.