📶 condensing stories into packages with Danny Chu (CEO @ Journey)

We live in an artificial era.

And an endless stream of other things that have become easier to fake.

You know what is still hard to fake? Customer testimonials.

That’s part of the reason why I love Journey and what Danny is building. You can look through what customers say, and you’ll quickly see how they feel about the product.

Here’s a masterclass from him on what he’s building, what he’s learned along the way, and how he is applying lessons from previous companies to execute …

My name's Danny, CEO of Journey.io.

My background has been mainly in early stage software or SaaS sales In 2015, I started a small bootstrapped company called Note Ninja. Basically, it was, a competitor to Fathom, Gong, Chorus, all these guys that are out there. I built it for about two years, and sold it to Salesloft in 2017.

After that, about four and a half years ago, I started a company called XO Capital with two other co-founders. In a span about four and a half years, we bootstrapped to a small portfolio of 12 micro-saas companies, three of which were former YC companies. One of those Journey.

I consider Journey a horizontal tool at the moment, but what I believe it does really well is, it communicates your story conveniently and effectively to the people that you want your story told to.

Use cases include: investor deck and deal flow sharing from venture capital and private equity firms, sharing sales material (obviously), and sharing marketing material. Simply put, if you care about how your story is being received, Journey improves that part of your story.

What did I keep? The product.

The product is great. It isn’t heavy or clunky, it’s designed for usage; it's beautiful. It does what it's supposed to do, and it delivers value to our clients.

What did you kill? Pretty much every operational stack. When you're venture-backed, you start investing in tons and tons of tools, and these start to stack up. We killed most of it.

What these has changed? I'm not sure.

Our first attempt when we bought journey was to transition the tool to a pure kind of digital salesroom. It was initially very horizontal competing with Gamma because they both came out at the same time. But then we took it and pivoted it from more sales enablement software to a digital salesroom. We did that for about a year and around February or March of this year, we looked at 12 months of data and realized it wasn't working.

It was too big of a lift. There's too much competition to kind of carve out a niche. So we're kind of back to square one and really focusing on sort of this.

If you're selling a $500,000 manufacturing unit and you're using Zoom to sell this machinery, you don't want to use a link. Follow up with nothing or text heavy things.

Maybe you have a 3D model. Maybe you have product demos. Maybe you have videos. You don't want to send any of that information. So we're trying to figure out kind of these characteristics where people are people care.

Whatever story or message you have gets delivered when it matters.

We still lose today mainly because this is.

You see a lot of tools out there where the solution is positioned as the the prep. The presentation killer. The Google Slides killer.

Our opinion is that nobody is going to kill Google Slides. It is very, very hard to change behavior - that's what I've learned.

Probably one of the famous ones is getting people out of email and into Slack, right? That was a huge change in behavior. But they were able to do it for a variety of reasons.

The main objection we are competing against is the question of “why should I put my Google Slides in a Journey?” Here’s how we think about answering that question:

And that means something, especially if whatever it is that you're delivering matters to you. It matters to your prospect or customer, whomever it is that you're talking.

The first really cool experience from the customer side inside of Journey is when you deliver your value story. From the client side, it’s whenever they receive their first Journey.

The feedback we’ve gotten from customers who love the product is “I can actually see what my clients are doing in here and I can provide them a better experience because I know what's important to them”.

The other really big shift that I'm trying to focus on is building for the B2B buyer journey.

That's very different than what I'm used to.

I used to hop on three or four demos a week trying to learn what software is interesting to me and I don't mind hearing that pitch. Nowadays, information gathering, asking your community, looking on LinkedIn, doing your own Google searches, doing ChatGPT searches, all these things, free trials, other free tools to figure out what's right and what's not.

Those touch points don't have as much control over as a physical synchronous conversation, and that's where I think something like Journey helps is that it communicates your story in a personal authentic way. A better than the alternative.

And I think, again, nowadays, that matters a lot more, especially if you want to be able to see and track how those things are assets are being interacted with in the wild.

That's why for Notion and all these big players, it took them awhile to figure that out. It needs to start small, and that’s where I’m at right now.

I don't really have a lot to say there other than we're figuring it out because it didn't work in the beginning.

We saw a lot of people using journey for one purpose. After doing interviews, I learned that our best customers, they use Journey everywhere. They've sort of made a commitment to say, yes - how things are shared, presented, received, regardless of where it is - that is important to me and my business, and I believe Journey is the best mechanism.

Some customers are saying “I have a job posting where I used to have three or four links to case studies or Notion pages. Now I have it all in one single Journey.” That’s one example.

Another could be “I have actually ads everywhere, and it used to go to this HubSpot landing page that I created. But now it actually goes to a Journey.”

Or another could be “I build lead magnets in Gamma, in a Notion page, or in a Google Doc, and I gate keep it. Now I have that in Journey.”

So you can see the use cases vary, but we’ve made an effort to take in data based on how customers are using the product, and apply that to building public-facing resources that reduce friction for the next cohort of customers.

Not only the decisions that you made, but the initial reason why you made that decision. Your job as a founder is to allocate resources towards what’s working and away from what isn't working.

I think at an early stage, it's also very important to question why you decided to take those actions.

Fundamentally, sometimes you need to take a step back and say, “Hey, is the reason why I decided to take any and all of these actions right?” Because this idea of finding product market fit - it's a very fundamental thing. And I think sometimes we ask questions just at the surface instead of going deeper to find the answer at the root.

Don't! (I'm just kidding.)

Take Tibo for example. He built Tweet Hunter, Outrank, and several other tools. He was very popular on LinkedIn and I think he sold his Tweet Hunter to Lemlist or Lempire. His newsletter the other day talked about something that stuck with me

That would be my advice. Because sales tools are so competitive, so much noise, so many use cases, so many competitors are already built. I think to find success, you kind of need to start very narrow and focused.

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