285: How to Mitigate Mistakes Through Smart Decision Making - with James Weir

EPISODE SUMMARY

Starting a software business can be intimidating, especially for those who have not envisioned themselves as entrepreneurs. However, sometimes, the most successful ventures emerge from unlikely beginnings.

This week’s episode of Scale Your SaaS delves into the journey of ndaOK with CEO and founder James Weir. This company began with a reluctant founder but has experienced remarkable growth by addressing a common problem with innovative solutions. Sit back as we discuss mitigating mistakes through intelligent decision-making with host and B2B SaaS Sales Coach Matt Wolach.

PODCAST-AT-A-GLANCE

Podcast: Scale Your SaaS with Matt Wolach

Episode: Episode No. 285, "How to Mitigate Mistakes Through Smart Decision Making - with James Weir"

Host: Matt Wolach, a B2B SaaS Sales Coach, Entrepreneur, and Investor

Guest: James Weir, Founder and CEO at ndaOK

TOP TIPS FROM THIS EPISODE

• Connect with an AI Expert
• Research and Validation
• Find a Common Pain Point
• Launch to Early Success
• Niche Down, Then Expand

EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS

• The Reluctant Founder
• From Law to Tech
• The Birth of an Idea

TOP QUOTES

James Weir

[17:41] “We started to develop that FOCUS. And now, as we've nailed that market and that customer segment, we're starting to spread out and go wider again and start to deal with enterprise sales teams and real estate investors and others that have that problem at a large enough scale where the solution is important for them.”

Matt Wolach

[12:53] “Email effectiveness is dwindling down and down every year.”

LEARN MORE

To learn more about ndaOK, visit: https://www.ndaok.com/ 

You can also find James Weir on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/weirjames/ 

For more about how host Matt Wolach helps software companies achieve maximum growth, visit https://mattwolach.com

Get even more tips by following Matt elsewhere:

• Sales Tips
• LinkedIn
• Twitter
• Instagram

Transcript

Matt Wolach: 0:10

You know, in doing this show, I'm very fortunate I meet a lot of great and smart leaders from software. And they're building their businesses and doing it in different ways. And I love hearing all these different approaches and how they're doing and how they became successful. And James Weir is awesome. He's super smart about what he's done. He spent a year researching the problem that he thought people needed to solve to make sure that it wasn't just his problem that other people had the problem. He talked with all kinds of perfect customers, he did that effort and then build the product to what they said. And afterwards, as he's made decisions, he's always done it looking at his own decision making process to make sure that he's not making emotional decisions or just making snap decisions. He wants to make sure that the decisions he's making are smart decisions each time and he explains his process here. I think it's really interesting. I think you can get a lot out of it. So enjoy this one.

Intro/ Outro: 0:58

Welcome to Scale Your SaaS, the podcast that gives you proven techniques and formulas for boosting your revenue and achieving your dream exit brought to you by a guy who's done just that multiple times. Here's your host, Matt Wolach,

Matt Wolach: 1:14

and welcome to Scale Your SaaS Thank you very much for being here. Thank you for listening on the podcast network or watching on YouTube. Really appreciate you being here. Definitely make sure you're subscribed to the show. You do not want to miss any of the amazing people, we have coming up lots of leaders who have done great things with their companies who are going to share their story with you. So you can learn how to scale your SaaS. And today we have one of those such leaders. I am so excited to be joined by James. James, How you doing?

James Weir: 1:40

Great, man, how are you?

Matt Wolach: 1:42

I'm doing really well also, and really, really glad you're here. Thank you so much. I want to make sure everybody knows. I want to make sure if Thank you Good. I'm glad I want people to understand who you are because you got a great story. So James is the founder and CEO at NDA. Okay. And ndaOK is transforming the way investment banks and private equity investors process NDAs the solution was built from the ground up to serve the unique needs of deal teams, and they really know NDAs and the issues that matter to their clients. And really James's strengths are building high performance teams managing risk and finding creative solutions to problems. So he's got a lot to share with us. And I can't wait. James, thanks again for coming on the show.

James Weir: 2:20

Well, that was a great intro. I don't know if I can add anything to it. We might as well just kind of wrap up here. Because it's probably going to be all downhill. That was great. Thank you.

Matt Wolach: 2:30

You're welcome. You're welcome. But tell me what's going on with you lately? And what's coming up?

James Weir: 2:35

Yeah, so, ndaOK. We launched two and a half years ago. But we just we keep growing, we keep expanding. In the last few months, we just released our latest update, which incorporates opening eyes GPT, for AI into our AI review and redlining process. And so we're rolling that out to new customers every week. And it's been it's been great. It's been great to see just how that's been, you know, what it's done to our process internally, and what we've been able to offer our customers as a result.

Matt Wolach: 3:12

Very cool. I love that. How did you come up with this whole thing?

James Weir: 3:16

You know, I, it was something that I never, I'm probably the the most reluctant founder in history, I had no plans of ever launching a company, and no interest in it, really. But I practice law in New York for 11 years before my family, we moved to Austin, Texas. And I decided I just didn't want to practice law anymore. And so I started to explore other things and ended up as the CEO of a tech company that was using artificial intelligence, great company that was using AI to identify and categorize household hazardous waste, to divert it into more effective and efficient waste streams. And from there, you help build that company. But then there was an opportunity to move into the CFO role at a software company, where we were building enterprise software, and I had to deal with two or three nondisclosure agreements a week. And I did that for two and a half years and just thought there's got to be a better way to do this. This is insane. These agreements are just, you know, very standardized nuisance C agreements that are really just a threshold kind of gatekeeper function for deals. There's got to be a way that we can simplify that review, automate that process for companies so it isn't nearly as painful. Because I had experienced that pain firsthand for like I said, two and a half years. And so it was an idea that I just couldn't shake. And so I reached out to the AI advisor of that first company that I worked with in Austin. I hadn't spoken to him in a couple of years. And I just said, Look, you know, I have this idea, can artificial intelligence do this type of work? Can it review a contract and mark it up, certainly for a simple NDA. And I was half hope, hoping that this guy, his name is Russell fold Smith, he's one of the preeminent AI advisors. And he was the the first employee of Wolfram Alpha. So if that means something to your listeners that that should tell you all you need to know. And I was half hoping he was gonna say no AI, you know, as great as it is, he's not sophisticated enough to read a contract, or certainly redline it. And I was hoping he was gonna say that, so I could kind of drop the idea and move on with the rest of my life. But instead, he said, Yes, that's exactly. And more. So not only can it do that, but it's a that's exactly the sort of routine nuisance II type work that AI should be doing instead of people. And he said, You know what, I want to help you get it off the ground. And so at that point, I just, yeah, I really didn't have a choice, he seen a million of these things. And if he thought it was a good idea, then then I kind of had to do it. So that's how we got started. That was back in late 2019. And then we really just spent about a year really researching and, you know, kicking the tires on the idea, you know, it's one thing that, you know, for me to have a problem that I want to solve, but does anybody else have that problem? You know, is it just me being frustrated with dealing with the same thing over and over again? And, you know, and that's just something that I have to deal with? Or is this a problem that other companies were experiencing? And that's ultimately that's what we found that I wasn't alone. NDAs pose a huge problems, posed huge problems for basically, you know, any company, right. You know, even if you're a b2c company, at some point, you're signing a nondisclosure agreement, right? It's either with a supplier or a partner, somebody. And so after learning, you know, that validating that, okay, this was a need that people had, and validating. Well, here are our ideas on how we can solve that and people getting excited about that. That's when we really dug in and started building the product. And then we launched in early 2021.

Matt Wolach: 7:37

Very cool. I love that you had those conversations, because so many times people are building products, and they haven't gone out into their market and really talked with perfect fit customers to understand what are the real problems? How deep is that problem? And would you even pay money for that, and really getting to the heart of it. And I'm so glad you did that, because I've done a lot of these shows 200 Some of these episodes with with software founders, and the ones who are the most successful have said, we've had so many conversations with our market with our perfect targets that we really have a good understanding of what everybody's facing, not just what we're thinking about. And we know how to build a product that makes it easier to market your your services and speak their language makes it easier to sell and set up your sales process correctly. Sounds like it set you guys up nicely.

James Weir: 8:20

Yeah, and like I said, I didn't set out to start a company, right. And I know that there are lots of founders out there that are just, you know, that's their DNA, they want to be a builder, they want to be a founder and their, their their chant champing at the bit to start something they just need that idea. And you know, it's usually that first or second idea that they come up with. And then you get into the unfortunate position of, of having, you know, a solution in need of a problem. Or you have an engineer that's like, well, I could build this really cool thing. And wouldn't that be amazing? Well, yeah, but does anybody need it? Does anybody want that? And so I took it much more from the user perspective as well. This was a product that I want and need. And of course, the the cruel irony of this is the idea was born out of the fact that I never wanted to look at an NDA ever again. And of course now, that's all I do and think about.

Matt Wolach: 9:22

That is cruel irony. That's for sure. You know, a lot of our listeners, they're part of new startups, just like you and I want to understand, okay, you've got the idea. You talk to these people. How did you get off the ground? How did you start making your first sales?

James Weir: 9:35

Yeah, so we didn't actually start. I mean, I haven't come from other startups. I knew the importance of not messing around and getting the revenue as quickly as possible. I think there was a time when startups could raise a lot of funding and be you know, pre revenue for a long time and you know, and that was perfectly fine. But we were entering a phase when ndaOK started where that was no longer the preferred path that we, you know, it would be better for us as a company to be to get to revenue as quickly as possible. But we needed a product first. And so those first sales weren't really sales, they were talking to potential customers talking to contacts, talking to people that responded to surveys that we sent out to say, or even just having, you know, our website up with a button to sign up for a demo, which at the time didn't exist, you know, talking with those people and saying, Well, hey, this is what we're building, this is what we're trying to do. And those people, you know, or, or just asking them, you know, how can we solve this problem for you? And then hearing from them what kind of features they needed, what they needed the product to do? We didn't have to sell to them once we said, okay, great. That's what we're going to build. Do you want to be one of our early testers? Invariably, they said, Yes, you know, we want this we want, you know, after we showed them kind of what we were going to do, they signed up and volunteered to be our, our testers. And then from there, once, you know, we worked out the kinks, they were ready to be our customers. So we really started from the foundation of okay, you know, here are here, there, there's a whole universe of customers, but here's a group of 10 is what we started with 10 companies that have this problem, that are going to stick with us, as we build the product that they have told us they need. And of course, you know, everybody has, you know, different priorities or preferences, and we need this or we need that. But by by having, you know, by talking to so many different people, we kind of got it down to, okay, it needs to have this functionality. And we can kind of see that, what the process needed to be like for them and what the user experience needed to be. And so really, those first sales just came out of those early conversations of, of, of discovery for who our customers are and what that product needs to be. And then from there, we understood the customer base really well, we understood, you know, what markets we wanted to address who had the pain point, but who, you know, where was it really acute or chronic pain points for them? You know, we've, as you mentioned at the top, we work primarily right now with, you know, private equity firms and investment banks. Well, they're dealing with hundreds of NDAs every year. In fact, our average private equity user is dealing with anywhere between 406 100 NDAs a year, we're doing multiple NDAs every day. And so it is a chronic, constant pain point for them. And that's you know, that's really how we got started was just focusing on on the user and what they needed rather than Well, what can we build?

Intro/ Outro: 12:53

We'll be right back.

Unknown: 12:56

Scale Your SaaS is supported by ToroWave.

Matt Wolach: 13:01

Lots of software leaders I talked to are looking to scale their SaaS and I keep hearing over and over about one major struggle getting ghosted by buyers after the demo. How frustrating is it when you have a great demo? You're feeling good they like it, it seems like a done deal and then crickets, nothing reach out they're not responding to you at all. And when these software companies they asked me to dive in, I noticed that the sellers are following up the wrong way or actually I should say with the wrong medium what they're doing is they're hammering emails over and over again. I got a newsflash for you email effectiveness is dwindling down and down every year so why beat your head against the wall losing all kinds of business start texting mixing texts along with emails and calls and watch your conversion rates go up in fact conversion rates go up by about 50% When you use texting as part of the follow up people are used to it and did you know they'll response rate on text is 98% 98% So why throw emails into a black hole knowing that they're never gonna get returned text buyers and get results but don't use your own phone all kinds of security and compliance issues if you do also none of that data is with your company. That's not good. Instead use this system Torowave Toro wave is designed for sales. It makes texting with buyers super simple and fast and it helps drive more deals, deals that you've been losing until now for being a listener. You get 50% off your first month of using Toro away 50% off just go to Toro wave.com/scale That's t o r o wav.com/scale get signed up and start winning more deals like Tracy who closed $170,000 In three days after starting again go to Toro wave.com/scale Catch up and win by texting with poor win and we're back. I love that. And so you found your niche and did you find that once you niche down it was a lot easier to kind of focus on that as a lot easier to get them to understand, this is something that can help you.

James Weir: 15:04

Yeah, you know, having not, I don't have a sales background. And one of the things that I knew we were on to something, as someone without a sales background, when I didn't really have to explain the problem to people. If I, you know, if I met somebody and said, you know, hey, NDA, okay, we help, you know, we automate the processing of non disclosure agreements. If, if they didn't, you know, if they said, Oh, well, you know, how big a market is that or what, you know, what, what kind of price, you know, how was that really a problem for people? I knew immediately, they weren't our customer. But more often than not, all I would have to say is, oh, NDA, okay. Again, if I met somebody, you know, at a conference or something, I'd say, Well, you know, NDA, okay, we automate the processing of non disclosure agreements, and people would light up. And they would say, Oh, that's a problem that I have. Can you simplify, you know, the NDA review and execution process? And, and that's, you know, so I didn't have to explain like, well, this is what we can do for you. They, you know, just by virtue of saying, well, we fix this problem for you, they immediately understood like the value that we were, we were able to deliver for them. I love that one of the best advantages of finding that niche that everybody already gets it and just showing them, hey, they're really there, you either have the problem and you understand it, or you don't, in which case, I know no amount of you know, explaining or convincing is going to turn you into a customer because you don't have the problem. You don't you don't need what we're what we're selling. Yeah. And I think that's so smart to understand. I mean, if you tried to sell this to me, I'm like, Well, the last time I saw an NDA was like, 2020. So yeah. And I would say, you know, what, that's great. You don't need us. And, you know, thank goodness, you don't if, you know, if I if I can convince the world, we don't need these agreements anymore. And they're kind of useless. I would, I can't, you know, you can't change people's feelings about these, or you know, they're there. It's just fully ingrained in their process. So if we can't, you know, eliminate the problem, how can we just make it easier and less painful for them? I love that. And I love that you didn't, like freak out that, oh, no, we can't sell to these people, or these people, you realized, these are our perfect fits. And I think too many times early stage, we just want all the revenue we can get we take anybody we can get, without realizing that one, the sales process will be a lot harder, they're not going to fully get it, you have to, like you said, explain it more. And number two, if even if they do sign up, they're gonna hate the products not going to help them, they're going to quit, they're going to tell people it's terrible. And now Now you're worse off. And that's that's a great point. So early, and we kind of went through that process. And the the way I see it, it's almost like an hourglass, right? We started really wide saying, okay, yeah, basically, everybody's got this problem, everybody needs to sign an NDA at some point. So the world the universe could be, you know, everybody could be a customer. And what we found with a lot of our early customers, even the people that were saying, hey, wow, this is a really, you know, really difficult problem for us, we really need help with this. Well, we could get them signed up. But if if they only were dealing with, you know, two or three NDAs a month? Well, it may have been painful for them, but not enough to pay for a solution. And so we started to narrow down the field of, you know, the customer types that we could address. And we I always knew that private equity firms and investment banks dealt with a ton of them. We didn't mark it to them initially, because we wanted to iron out all the you know, make sure that we could handle that volume before before we started to, you know, to work with them. But then we started to develop that FOCUS. And now as we've really nailed that market, and that customer segment, now we're starting to spread out and go wider again, and start to deal with enterprise sales teams and real estate investors and others that have that problem at at a large enough scale, where solution is, is important for them.

Matt Wolach: 19:15

I love it. Love it. So you we talked about some of the good things you did you niche down was great. What mistakes do you feel like you made that you wish you had done differently? I mean, I've made a ton of mistakes. We've all made mistakes.

James Weir: 19:30

It's hard to say, you know, I for every mistake we've made, it's been based on the best information we've had at the time, or our our best, you know, assessment of the market or the customer or what the product needs to be in some of those assumptions and data that we had were weren't. were correct. I don't have any regrets about it, though. We've learned I've taken and lessons away from those things, but I don't have any regrets, or I don't wish we had done anything differently. Because if we got everything right all the time, we wouldn't have learned anything. And in fact, you know, if you're getting everything right all the time, then you're probably missing some big opportunity. Because you haven't, you know, you're you're not, you're not doing enough to know where, where the limits are. I would agree. And I would also say, if you're getting it right all the time, you're probably not hungry to make sure you're doing everything just right. Because when you mess up, you're like, oh, I don't want that to happen. Again, let me make sure a double and triple check this and make sure I really research this thing. And it kind of gives you that motivation to want to make everything just right, because you know that if you don't do that, it's gonna go bad. That's right. And there's always there are always ways to improve our process. And, you know, if we're not making mistakes, or missing opportunities, and learning, you know, about those opportunities that we're missing, then then we're not growing, and we're being a little too cautious. So there's a balance, you know, I don't, I don't love the whole, you know, go fast and break things. And, you know, the mentality that a lot of companies have, I want to be smart and deliberative. But I also don't want that to get in the way of learning and the growth that we can achieve.

Matt Wolach: 21:28

I think that's super smart. What advice would you have for other early stage leaders who are seeking to build a successful business like you've done? Yeah, honestly, I, well, I haven't done it enough different ways to say, well do this, don't do that. But what I mentioned about my own journey, you know, be skeptical about your own ideas be, you know, don't don't just think that, oh, well, I think that's a great idea, everybody else is going to agree with me test every idea, every hypothesis, you have reach out to as many people as you can, to talk about the idea learn, you know, just hear their perspective on things. You know, I have friends in other industries that, you know, maybe have great ideas for things that they want to try, but they're not, you know, they're in traditional industries where they don't necessarily, you know, they don't know the startup market very well. And they're, they're afraid to get started, just because they don't, you know, they don't want to share their idea with someone, they're afraid, you know, somebody might steal it, or somebody might, you know, run a run off with it. And you're just not going to, you're going to be the inertia is going to, you know, is going to kill you that way. And so you've got to just move forward and and, you know, talk to people test your assumptions. And only then, do you, you know, will you know that you actually have something you want to be you should want to be challenged, you should want people to push back on your ideas and say, you know, I don't see that. And we have that a few times. But we also had in the conversations early on that I have, overwhelmingly people said, Oh, wow, that would be great. I really liked that it was it was rare for to get challenged. But I loved getting challenged, because then I had to think well, shoot, am I not explaining it the right way? Or am I overestimating this market? Am I only talking to the people that are agreeing with me? So I think that that's the really important thing. Because what's going to happen if you do that is you're going to end up in a situation where you, it's going to refine the idea, but you're going to have a product that people want, rather than saying, Okay, I'm a brilliant engineer, as I mentioned before, yeah, I not made but I mentioned earlier, brilliant engineers, they they go out and they say, Well, I can build this amazing system. But who needs it? Right? Who wants that? Are you actually solving a problem? And I think, you know, a lot of companies spend a lot of money going down blind alleys where they think they know what the product needs to be. But they haven't gotten it in the hands of their users yet to know, Oh, these are features that they actually don't care about. They care about these things over here. And we need to build that first. I agree. I think you're super smart with how you approach this, it seems like you do a great job of double checking, researching and then going back and making sure that you're not just thinking of it one way, because I think as leaders, we make a lot of emotional decisions, whether we like to think so or not. I like to think I'm not. But I look back, I'm like, Yeah, that was an emotional decision. And I love that you're kind of checking yourself. So I hope I mean, you know, it's one thing to say, hopefully, I'm living up to that. But yeah, thank you. Sounds like you are. Well, this has been great. How can our audience learn more about you and NDA? Okay. Yeah, so real simple. www dot NDAA. Okay, just the letters in da okay.com. And, you know, we we've primarily targeted, private

James Weir: 25:00

equity firms and investment banks, but we're, you know, if you have to deal with NDAs, you know, we've seen all of those scenarios, we help, you know, we have a very flexible solution where, you know, we can either just provide the review in the redlining, or we can handle the end to end process, everything from the review the red lining to the negotiations and the executions, also, that we can make it as simple as uploading a NDA and waiting to get a notification that the whole process is done. And we're also fast and cost effective. So those are, those are two added bonuses, but NDAok.com. You can, you can shoot an email to info at ndaOK.com. And if you reference this, that'll get that'll get

Matt Wolach: 25:47

brought to my attention and happy to have a conversation with anyone interested in learning more. Okay, perfect. We'll put all that into the show notes as well. So if you're listening, you can grab it right there. But he's James, where James, thank you very much for coming on the show.

James Weir: 26:00

Yeah, Matt, really appreciate it. Thanks very much. Absolutely. And everybody else out there.

Matt Wolach: 26:04

Thanks for being here. Really appreciate you doing that and listening and soaking up everything we're giving you make sure you're subscribed to the show. You don't want to miss out any other amazing leaders like James so hit that subscribe button, and then we will see you next time. Take care.

Intro/ Outro: 26:20

Thanks for listening to Scale Your SaaS. For more help on finding great leads and closing more deals. Go to Mattwolach.com