I Spent 24hrs Working at This $205M Startup

This is Shane. He's the co-founder and CEO of Air, a creative operations platform founded in 2017. >> Seven years ago, my co-founder Tyler, I noticed that every company around the globe was becoming a media company, creating and scaling a bunch of content. And so, we built this company Air to help businesses scale the amount of images and videos that they work with every day. >> Think of it as a Dropbox meets frame.io meets chatbt. Right now, the company is at a turning point. After raising their series V of $35 million earlier this year, Air has entered go to market fit or what Shane calls the second phase of building. >> We're living through this like 18 to 24month hellhole where you roll up your sleeves and you refine. >> They have customers. They know the product works, but now it's figuring out what actually drives growth and where to invest in their salesunnel. But we'll get back to that later. Okay. So, we're Air and we manage I >> You're all good. You're all good. And that's me. I'm Payton, a producer on a mission to see what it really takes to run high growth startups and what founders do dayto-day to keep scaling. So I spent 12 hours inside air getting a front row seat into team meetings, product reviews, and how Shane leads the company through this critical stage. But when I arrived, Shane upped the stakes. By the end of the day, I was given one job. Pitch the product back to the CEO. >> What do you want to do? everything. >> Shane ran me through his schedule. My day was now packed with back-to-back meetings, design reviews, one-on- ones with the sales team, all leading up to the goal of delivering a full sales pitch back to him. >> Basically, by the end of today, >> okay, >> you're going to be able to walk me through this deck and give me a sales demo of a workspace. And then you're coming to the event. So, you're going to be smoozing at the event and trying to sell some software. >> All right. So, I had less than five hours to learn the product, pitch the product, and try to sell it by the end of the night at their social mixer on the future of creative work. I feel like there's no time. >> We'll figure it out. Can you do deck demo with Payton at 11:00? >> Yeah. >> Great. Lovely. Here you go. There's your coach. >> Okay. >> All right. Why don't we give Why don't we give Payton the like quick overview of the new brand just so she can see it? >> Oh, like the brand brand. the brand brand. >> People didn't love our logo. I think >> that's Lou. She walked me through Air's rebrand, which was going live in just 2 weeks. >> Here's kind of a summary of what our new visual identity will look like. It's all very centered on the idea of space to breathe, which is kind of trademark message. >> But the real purpose of this meeting was to align with Hector, their brand designer, on exactly what needed to be done and when to make sure every asset was ready for launch. >> The thing that's going to take the most time is the sales side. >> I agree. So that's going to be a work of art. >> Can you move the rebrand renewal deck and expansion deck into planning? >> Are you [ __ ] We got to go. Give me another meeting. >> Hi guys. Thanks for a great meeting. >> Lovely. >> Can't wait to see the final product. >> We've been building this product for 7 years and we've added so much new functionality in the last three. And over the last 3 years, we're like constantly bolting things on. And so UI2 gives us the opportunity to like sit down, think holistically about the experience, and reinvision it from the ground up. To explain it simply, Air provides search, storage, collaboration, feedback, and distribution for its users. >> This is like a reskinning of the entire platform. What do you want? A dare shirt or do you want a sweater back? >> Yeah. >> Okay. Wait, you want me to put it on right now? >> Correct. Yeah. Yeah. You're becoming a salesperson. >> Um, okay. I got you an intern for the day. >> Wow. >> All right. All you. >> Okay. Well, where are you going? >> I got stuff to do. We offer you some tin fish, a bone broth, hot sauce. >> What's a tin fish? >> You don't like tin fish? >> Eric spent the next 45 minutes walking me through their sales strategy. And it was a lot, especially for someone like me whose only experience was selling chocolate bars in the third grade. But one thing that stood out to me was how soft their sales approach actually is. And what I mean by that is unlike most SAS companies which rely heavily on paid ads and cold outbound, Air generates most of its leads through inbound. Now let's run through an example of how this plays out in real time. Air hosts about two networking events a month for creatives which gives the sales team a chance to ask questions and learn about the real challenges potential customers are facing. And instead of pushing for a sale on the spot, they follow up later with messages like, "Hey, it was great meeting you. I'd love to grab 20 minutes to dig a bit deeper into some of the challenges that we talked about." From there, the account executives meet with the prospects, give their deck and demo, and figure out if air can actually be the solution to their problems. And the strategy is clearly working. According to Shane, after a customer talks to one of these sellers, they close about 40 to 60% of deals, which is way above average for most SAS companies. >> Any questions, concerns, thoughts? >> Um, I mean, I think I'm I think I'm processing. >> I mean, you got a demo in 4 hours. opportunities back to Shane, >> right? >> I have a lot of information in my brain right now that I don't want to lose. Hello, >> this is nice to meet you at HubSpot. Great to meet you. >> She's been following us. >> Love it. >> She's like an AE for a day. >> Amazing. >> Alex Lieberman is the founder and co-founder of Morning Brew and Story Arb along with a bunch of other companies. Shane tries to meet with like 12 founders a month so he can try and learn how others approach their business strategies and reflect and refine his own playbook for scaling air. So, I decided to tag along or in this case behind. >> All right, Peyton, what's your question for Alex the guru himself is here. >> What's What's >> my favorite restaurant in Hoboken? >> Yeah. No, actually, I'm curious. >> Um, I love Martha's and I love margaritas. >> How have you built a mindset to be a founder of so many different companies? >> Um, >> wow. >> One is I think I'm entirely unemployable. I've always been deeply creative and like love the feeling of invention of going from like I have an idea to willing it into existence and it being valuable for the world. Like to me entrepreneurship is freedom and I love the the ability to invent things completely freely. >> Fundamental belief is every company's operating like a media company. We have brands like Native and Hims and Hers. We have high growth tech startups like Ramp, other tech platforms like Wistia. Jacob's one of the newest employees here and he also had to give the same pitch back to Shane, but now he does it pretty much every day. So, I asked him for some tips and tricks. I don't think I've had to present in front of people since like high school. >> But you're doing these videos all the time, I'm sure. >> Yeah, but this is different. >> Okay, 30-minute meeting, last meeting you'll see. And then we'll rip your deck down. >> Just so we're all on the same page of what actually happened during this meeting. I don't know. It was something where they were reviewing the UI updates, but to be honest, I tuned everyone and everything out and sat at the back of the room continuing to study for my pitch. We're aiming to integrate with all tools, teams, and stages of creative work. I won't lie, I was freaking out. While the entire team went to lunch, I stayed back to cramp for a pitch. I had like 20 minutes to learn. And the crazy thing is, I think Jacob had like 2 months of practice before he had to do this. So, yeah, I was a bit stressed. I had to figure out what this product even does, why creatives actually use it, and somehow sell the product back to Shane. >> Do we get it? >> Yeah. >> I'm freaking out right now. Oh my god. Okay. >> Ready? >> Yep. >> You're going to stand up. >> Oh, okay. >> You want to take a little deep breath? >> Okay. Air structures their sales pitch into four steps. Build credibility, share the vision, introduce the problem, show how the product solves it step by step, and I think I nailed it. I don't know. Let's roll the clips. Okay, so we're Air and we help manage media assets for businesses. As you can see, today we're working with over 2,500 brands and we're hiring way more editorial people and marketing teams to try and create this like brand for their business. And they want people to find images and videos is growing. the size of creative teams aren't growing fast enough and that's leaving the creative process faster. So what we do at air is we help store and manage your creative workflows giving you a better way to find approve and share your content. Any questions? >> Good. >> Thanks. But that was just the deck. Next came the demo. This is our platform and on the side we have libraries. So actually AI will automatically come up with a description of your image and it also pulls out all of the text on each photo. We didn't have to manually enter any of this. Air does it for you. It tells you what's in this photo. See here it has its tags. Updates when it was last modified and then you can version stack. Every time like you upload a new thing, it automatically populates like your old versions will be there. >> Mhm. Can I ask you a question? >> Yeah. >> Why does any of this matter? I remembered that Eric and Jacob told me to use some of my personal experience to help drive my pitch. So that's exactly what I did in this moment. You saw my desktop just then, right? Do you see how much of a mess that was? I am not organized. I don't want to take the time to be organized. So to be able to just put it somewhere and this system know everything for you. It makes it super easy. You get way more time back. You don't have to worry about oh did I name this correctly? The beginning of every sales meeting is the most important part which is called discovery. And in discovery, >> so yeah, I up and forgot about discovery. But to save you from doing the same, my team pulled together the six non-negotiable questions you should always ask when talking to prospects. Links in the description. Use it to help you land your next deal. >> Think of it like a therapy session. Your job as a seller is to just try to listen and learn. And then ideally regurgitate those messages back to the person by showing them the value of where their problems lie. You are the customer. So you've live, you know this cold because it's like what you experience every day. >> Mhm. >> These are some of the things where a seller's required to have a really wide roster of workflows in their back pocket so that they can evoke these stories. And putting the stories in context is what brings the deal. All right. So, tonight at this event, if you get one MQL, which is someone to book a demo with us, I'll then mail you 50 bucks. [Applause] >> Okay, for the next hour, Shane broke down's entire salesunnel and how they plan to continue to scale, but I'm going to try to explain it in 1 minute. So, here we go. At the top of the salesunnel, leads fall into two categories. PQL's product qualified leads and MQL's marketing qualified leads. NQLs make up 70% of the lead generation and PQLs make up the remaining 30%. Now once a lead actually enters this funnel, they can fall into three categories. One, they just get the free version. Two, they buy it themselves, which is self-s serve. Or three, they raise their hand and they say, "Hey, I want to talk to your sales team." Now, what's interesting about this is 70% of customers are actually self-s served, but they only make up 30% of the business's revenue. And the remaining 30% of customers are the ones that talk to the sales team and they generate 70% of the business's revenue. All right, moving on. So once a lead actually talks to the sales team, the account executives close 40 to 60% of deals a month. From there, they get pushed into having a customer success manager whose job is to help the customers grow and generate more revenue for the company. Now, at the top of the funnel, something that's really important to note is that Air's top inbound channel is organic social and campaign. >> And our philosophy was like, if we're selling to creatives and trying to enable them to create great content, let's lead and let's do that ourselves. >> And since then, they've actually won a lot of awards. And one of their most recent was a Webbby award where they were recognized for their commercial starring the Rizzler, which was shot at a random park in Brooklyn. And social has also become their top inbound channel, which is really, really interesting. I feel like that's not really heard of in in enterprise software. Now, Air is working on refin timers up. Now, Shane says they will scale this in two ways. One, turn the top of the funnel into a predictable lead generation machine. And two, keep delivering a product that is bestin-class. To accomplish number one, Air is now adding salesqualified leads to the top of the funnel through outbound like cold emails, cold calls, and more aggressive prospecting. But here's Shane's core belief. Every successful enterprise software company finds one channel where they create arbitrage. Snowflake has field marketing, Monday.com has paid marketing, and Rippling and Ramp both have outbound engines where their STRs bring in two to three times more leads than the average company. And for Air, it's organic campaigns and always will be. As Shane puts it, we think we can do social campaigns better than everybody else in the market because it meets who we are as people and the identity of the company we've built. It meets what our customer cares about and it's way differentiated from our peers. >> And if Air is able to successfully mechanize the top of this funnel, it's only a matter of time before they raise Siri C, enter scale to market fit, and eventually go public. The final hour of the day was set aside for the go to market team to focus on outbound strategies like cold calls, cold emails, and really anything that would bring in a new lead. It's part of AI's new push to add SQL to the top of funnel and expand how they scale beyond inbound. >> You should have seen Pton's demo. She crushed it. >> Absolutely crushed it. You got to poach her. >> Wow. >> I was shook. >> I said if she wants to join the team, we should. >> That's cuz I had two really good coaches. >> She just forgot to do discovery, so I kind of ripped her. >> Hey, Max goes the deal, everyone. Max Pollson 12. [Applause] >> How about that? What fun. >> Dropped out of Stanford for a bit. Started a fintech company. blew up in my face after a year and a half and failed. >> Should you go back to school? >> I went back to school and finished my degree. Um, I'm Asian, so you you don't kind of have a choice around those kind of things. So, I moved out to New York and I worked at a it's a multi strategies fund called HBS Partners. I was investing in at the intersection of media and technology and we had invested in this television network, modern media company and it was going to [ __ ] and I was a board observer and you know working on the deal and then I was like I could do this better and they were like okay cool show us. So then I moved over and my job was basically to help lead the business through a restructuring of like how they created content, how they distributed it and um basically helped me sharpen my thesis on air. >> This is so cool. >> Yeah, it'll be fun. And then if we, you know, knock on wood, we're successful, we can break through this wall. Tyler and I like aren't going to have offices in the traditional sense. There'll just be like team rooms that we use a lot and then we'll sit out with everybody. There's going to be two of them right here and then the rest will be just open floor plan. Downstairs is the kitchen. Back room is like event space and then the basement is conference rooms, phone booths, art gallery. Here is very much like where creativity needs to focus. Below is where you're like sharing things, getting approval. Um, and then the basement is like showcasing things and distributing it. >> To close out the day, we headed to Air's event where Shane was hosting a round table conversation on the future of creative work. But honestly, my main focus was to complete Shane's challenge of getting at least one person to sign up for a demo. >> Thank you so so much for coming. >> Look, I think the concept of this evening was proof of concept. How to think about proving that something can be done regardless of what industry you work in. Many of you are are creatives or marketers and you're being asked or your companies are being asked to do something that hasn't really been done, which is how can we scale great creative work. >> What's your name? >> Ari. >> And what are you doing here? >> I uh I helped put it on. I'm I'm part of the planning crew. >> Yeah, you're him. >> Yeah, I'm what? I'm him. I'm him. >> You just sign up for a demo. So, you just like put your email in and then you'll talk to somebody on the air team and they'll give you a demo. >> Yeah, we talked about this because I can do it, too. I'm at a uh >> So, I ended up getting two people to sign up for a demo, and honestly, I think that's pretty good. And really, it wasn't that hard. Eric told me approach was simple. Network first, sell second. And that's exactly what I did. I built a relationship, created a connection, and eventually closed the deal. >> Please stay. Get some great folks around the room. Thank you so much for coming, and uh we'll see you the next one. [Applause] I think it's rare to find an organization that loves the intensity and the challenge of the work and find so much godamn joy in it. And I I hope you got a taste of that today. >> Yeah, you're awesome. Your team's awesome. I could see the respect that your team has for you and the vibes that you bring to the office, I think, are just really different than most founders out there. >> I have to Venmo you. >> Oh gosh. Get out of here. much. Wait, what's >> your Venmo handle? >> This was the first episode of our new series, Stories of Scale, where we spend a day with the people building fast growing companies to find out what it really takes. I'll be back soon with more founders, more scaling strategies, and maybe a few new skills along the way. And if you've got someone you think I should spend the day with next, drop their name in the comments. All right, that's all we got. Thanks for watching. See you next time, and please subscribe. Hi, I'm Shane. Payton is forcing me to do this and I really don't want to do it.

12 Hours with Air Inc. *Don’t mess up discovery like I did* 🔗 https://clickhubspot.com/5726a5 I spent 12 hours inside Air, the $205M creative operations startup, to see how they actually run and scale. I shadowed Shane Hegde, Air’s CEO & Co-founder, sitting in on meetings and learning their “network first, sell second” approach. By the end of the day, Shane challenged me to try and close a deal at a networking event later that night. Was I successful? You’ll have to watch to find out. Air’s growth engine looks a little different than most SaaS companies. Instead of leaning on outbound, they’ve built a marketing machine fueled by organic social and creative campaigns (and even won a Webby for a video with The Rizzler). This is the first episode of Stories of Scale, where we spend full days with founders to uncover what it really takes to build and grow these companies. P.S. Shane’s team swears he’s a big Ariana Grande fan. - Payton Chapters: 01:27 The Challenge: Deliver a Sales Pitch in 12 Hours 03:39 Meeting the Head of Revenue 05:10 Coffee with Alex Lieberman of Morning Brew 06:23 Deconstructing the Sales Pitch 07:36 The Final Pitch to the CEO 09:56 The Most Important Part of Any Sales Call 10:43 A Deep Dive into Air's Sales Funnel 12:57 Finding Your "Arbitrage Channel" 15:43 The Final Challenge: Get Two Demo Sign-Ups Subscribe for more Science of Scaling: 🔗 https://clickhubspot.com/5fjr Join our Data-Driven Sales Newsletter That Helps You Hit Quota Faster: https://blog.hubspot.com/the-science-of-scaling-subscribe Cold Calling Essentials: 👉 https://clickhubspot.com/a42eed ICP Expansion Guide: 👉 https://clickhubspot.com/d43908 The 30-Minute Battlecard Builder: 👉 https://clickhubspot.com/732ef4 The Revenue Leader’s Guide to Scaling: 👉 https://clickhubspot.com/3b0361 About HubSpot: HubSpot is a customer platform that provides education, software, and support to help businesses grow better. The platform includes marketing, sales, service, commerce, operations, and website management products that start free and scale to meet our customers’ needs at any stage of growth. Today, thousands of customers around the world use HubSpot’s powerful and easy-to-use tools and apps to attract, engage, and delight customers. ⚠️ Disclaimer: The videos on our YouTube channel are for informational purposes only, and are not intended as an endorsement for any of the products or services that we feature. #ScienceOfScaling #HubSpot