https://youtu.be/pTY2RIuxNDs
Rob Hirschfeld is the Founder and CEO of The RackN Digital Rebar platform that helps organizations scale their automation efforts. We discuss ways to turn customers into raving fans, the fastest way to build trust in your business, and the pros and cons of open-source software.
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Groom Customer Champions with Rob Hirschfeld
Our guest on the show is Rob Hirschfeld, who is the founder and CEO of RackN, a digital rebar platform that helps organizations scale their automation efforts. Rob, welcome to the show.
Thank you. I'm excited to be here.
Well, I'm very curious about you and your business here. So we're going to dive right in. So tell me a little bit about your journey. How did you end up founding a company that does Digital rebar of all things?
Oh, my entrepreneurial journey for RackN started over 20 years ago when I was doing standard IT work and I was consulting. And at the time, I just kept having the same issue over and over again, which is an operations issue. I could write software. It took me as much time to deploy, install, get everything working as it took to write the software. And I found that incredibly frustrating. And that led me to starting my first startup, which was a cloud, one of the very first cloud companies.
My co-founder and I actually patented cloud back in 2001. So it's a rare distinction. I'd never made any money on it. We were way too early. It's always a challenge of being an entrepreneur. And, you know, a lot of ways what RackN does with Digital Rebar is exactly the same part of that journey. It's asking that same question of “Why is it so hard for us to do the backend stuff, the, you know, running the infrastructure, making things work, you know, having that automation not take as much time as it takes.” It's been a frustration of mine going all the way back. And, you know, RackN is my latest foray into trying to solve that problem as a product.
Well, you know, as I was getting ready for this interview, I was looking into your product and into your website, it says digital rebar. Let me Google that to see what this is exactly. And all the, you know, all the information I kept coming in was all about reinforced concrete and metal rods that are used in reinforced concrete. And the only info source that came up was your website about it. So I guess you coined that thing as well, right?
It's definitely nice to have a product name that is unique in the industry. So Rebar, so for people who don't know, Rebar is the steel that people put into concrete to make it more durable and ductile. It's a core. It's actually the absolute core requirement for buildings, skyscrapers and buildings and bridges. And, you know, digital rebar for us as a name accomplish two things. One is, it is actually a good description of what RackN provides, which is the foundational pieces for building infrastructure and all the things that you build cloud applications, IT businesses around, which is really our focus.
But it's also an homage back to the original name of the product, which was Crowbar. And so when we started this journey, we started with an open source project that we named Crowbar, being the first tool that you use in— there's a Half-Life video game— and the first you start with a crowbar and no other tool. And so the idea was that you would use a crowbar to get your infrastructure built. And when that name— when it was time to sunset that name, the team wanted something that people in the know, wink and nod, would understand that was a reference back. And so Rebar accomplished both purposes. It turned out to be quite a good name for us.
Okay, well, definitely interesting and we're gonna get into this a little bit more. I have more questions, but before we go there, let's talk about the framework that you're bringing on this show. And I think we call it the build an internal champion framework or build internal champions framework. So can you explain to the listeners what this is about and why it's important and how you go about doing it?
I'd be happy to. So, we reckon is a product led company, and this is something that we had to figure out through trial and error. So some people would expect we'd call up CIOs and executives and get them to take our product and then bring that forward in the organization. We actually tried that. We had a salesperson and did that work. It didn't really work for us. What we found was that the people actually running the infrastructure, doing the implementations, could very easily throw sand in the gears and make everything not work. And so for us, no matter how much executive sponsorship we had, we actually had to win over the hearts and minds of the people who were going to run the system. And that is actually where we really shifted our strategy into a product led strategy.
So everything we do with RackN is get people to install, use, validate, make sure it works right. It's a very hands on experience. has led us to the point where once that person has tried the product, has used the product, has validated it at work, sometimes without talking to us at all, they understand the vision of what we're doing with the product and how it helps them, and they become an internal champion. And so our sales motion is really reliant on the idea of this architect leader who's done an evaluation, been hands-on, sees how we can solve a problem, and then they carry the value internally, what we call an internal champion, forward in their organizations. And in a lot of cases, it's really helpful to us because most enterprise IT organizations don't want a vendor, you know, sort of coming in and back-channeling, playing golf with the executives and influencing people, they really count on their internal references to make that work.
And so us building confidence in those internal champions is a really, really important way for us to sell product. Sometimes it's a little bit invisible because they're doing a whole bunch of that legwork without us knowing. And so there's always pros and cons to any sales strategy. But for us, having those internal champions has been absolutely essential. We're getting along old enough now that we have internal champions who've changed jobs and become internal champions in their new organizations. That is often just a fantastic way to walk into a new account.
That's great. Do you even have a SaaS function in the business or do you call it something else?
SaaS is one of those words that have multiple meanings.
Sorry, I didn't say SaaS. Sales, sales function. Is there a sales function in the business or you just-
Oh, that's a great question.
You just catalyze these champions and they take care of it and it's a very long-term approach.
We really don't. I mean, we have sales work, but it's really handled by our sales engineering team much more than our sales process, right? As CEO, I do a lot of the what people would traditionally call sales work. And we have classic things like a pipeline and a deals chart and things like that. But from a classic call people up and, you know, try and get them to buy the product, we really don't at the moment have that. We're talking about adding it more, but our first focus is really on helping people find our product, download the product, install, use it, and get that conversion experience. And that is such a cost-effective way to sell that we have a lot more juice in the lemon, if you will, to squeeze out to help make that process easier and more effective. And it's beautiful because once those architects understand the product, if we can empower them to sell in their organizations, then they really do a lot of that work for us.
So how do you generate that initial interest? How do you even conjure up their interest? How do they find you?
That is always a challenge. That's the marketing piece. It comes back down to storytelling. So there's a degree of awareness. There's a degree of having people be able to look at our website and understand what we do, which is something that is actually one of the hardest. That is the hardest thing we have to do in the business is actually to have simple explanations that people link back into their problems. And that's, we spend a lot of money doing advertising and LinkedIn, sponsoring conferences, talking at conferences, explaining the challenge. And you have to do it in a way that isn't very vendored. It's the way I would describe it. So most of those outlets aren't looking for a, you know, “Come try RackN, we're great.” You have to frame it in their problem space.
And, you know, “You're looking to solve this problem.” Here's how we help you solve that problem, or here's how you can think about that problem and check out RackN, we solve it really well. So it's a really careful narrative. It's very storytelling focused. And one of the things that for us has been a challenge is helping or having our customers tell that story for us more. So a referral type or a public story would really go a long way in cases like that. Our customers typically are very sensitive about using their name, their banks, media companies, hosting companies. And so that for us has been one of those slower processes that really help people understand how the product is used. So it's the other side of having operators start the process is that they typically hold things very close to their chest. They don't want everybody else to see their cards. And so that is probably one of our biggest challenges in storytelling.
Ok, so basically your sales processes or marketing slash sales process is to get the word out on this problem and how it can be solved and then get it in front of the potential champions who are the programmers, the engineers working these tech companies?
It does. That's exactly right. One of the things that we do in that that's really helpful for people to understand is we look for larger trends that we can be part of.
