How Time Kills All Deals in Pre-Sales with Rachel Pedreschi | Ep. 8

Listen: https://confluent.buzzsprout.com | In this episode, Tim Berglund talks to his guest, Rachel Pedreschi (DeltaStream), about her career in pre-sales engineering. Her first job: rectory office assistant at her local parish. Her challenge/theme: working at early-stage startups to bridge sales, marketing, and engineering to reach product-market fit.

Check out Tim and Rachel's previous podcast, Keyboard and Quill: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLihIrF0tCXdeJxpAJgbOsY48B9lD_w24v&si=5NjdA-Rss9Rsmyy1

SEASON 2
Hosted by Tim Berglund, Adi Polak and Viktor Gamov
Produced and Edited by Noelle Gallagher, Peter Furia and Nurie Mohamed
Music by Coastal Kites 
Artwork by Phil Vo 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Today, from rectory office assistant to queen of presales, this is Confluent Developer.

SPEAKER_00 0:06

Pretty much a salesperson goes, Hey, how can I get you the new or used software today? And the customer says, I don't know, what does it do? And they said, I don't know. Right. What does it do? If you're trying to sell a product that isn't open source, how do you define if you have product market fit? How do you define who your target customers are? I'm gonna say this was not a successful ending. So we actually lost that we lost the deal.

SPEAKER_02 0:28

Okay. Hello there, everyone. I'm Tim Berglund and welcome to Confluent Developer, the podcast where we explore the journeys of software developers tackling hard problems. In this episode, I'm interviewing my very good friend Rachel Padresky. From her humble beginnings as the office assistant at her local parish's rectory to becoming a well-known startup pre-sales leader, Rachel shares the story of constant JVM tuning from the earlier days of big data databases and the even bigger challenge of explaining go-to-market to technical founders without much background in it. Let's get to it.

SPEAKER_00 1:10

I am so happy to be here. Thank you.

SPEAKER_02 1:12

I am glad to be back in the podcasting studio with you. It's good to see you.

SPEAKER_00 1:16

It is. It's uh it just feels so natural. We're gonna sit here and have a chat.

SPEAKER_02 1:19

We've done this before. Links in the show notes. Um your friends. That's right. Um hey, uh tell us who you are and what you do.

SPEAKER_00 1:29

I will. Um my name is Rachel Padresky. And what do I do? That's an interesting question. Uh because you know, you invited me onto this podcast to talk about the most like technical challenge I have as an engineer, right? And it's very much in line like with what I do. So I and I was trying to find the quote for this. And if somebody like can wants to comment where they where I've heard this before, it's like I am called by many names.

SPEAKER_02 1:56

Yeah. But is it from the Silmarillion? I I don't, yeah, it's like a Tolkien thing.

SPEAKER_00 2:00

I don't know, but there's something. But I am uh called a sales engineer. I was originally called a sales engineer way back when. And then I was called a um a solution architect. Okay. And now I'm a field engineer. And I think we also have forward deployed engineers.

SPEAKER_02 2:14

Um that sounds kind of kind of tactical, kind of metal. I know, that's pretty cool.

SPEAKER_00 2:18

Like I gotta wear my like, you know, heavy-duty gear. Yeah. That's right. I'm forward deployed. Um, we're also called pre-sales engineers, pre-sales consultants. That's been my title before. We all do the same thing.

SPEAKER_01 2:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:30

And all well, our job is to help customers understand the product that my company is selling and get them moving either in a proof of concept or in a pilot, or in sometimes just their like kind of initial deployment.

SPEAKER_02 2:45

There you go. Yeah. I think of you as queen of pre-sales.

SPEAKER_00 2:48

That's kind of my that is actually a very good way of thinking about me as the queen of pre-sales. Yeah, yeah. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 2:53

Just uh one. There you go. There's a uh a salesperson who's a seller and maybe is conversant with some technical categories in their field, but they're not a technically trained person. You are and and team up on that that selling motion to help the salesperson answer technical questions, build things, all that kind of stuff. Aaron Powell Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:16

Pretty much the salesperson goes, Hey, how can I get you to newer use software today? And the customer says, I don't know. What does it do? And they said, Well, I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 3:25

Right.

SPEAKER_00 3:26

What is it new? Like, so this is what it does. Right. Um it's more nuanced than that, of course, because it always is.

SPEAKER_02 3:33

I need to have an actual seller on the show at some point because right now, if anybody's watching, they're like, no, it's a lot harder than that.

SPEAKER_00 3:38

And hey, dude, I like mad respect for for salespeople. And I have worked for some salespeople that they can forecast. So like you could eat off their forecast. They know exactly how much they're going to sell in the next quarter. And I'm kind of like, uh I don't that's tune a JVM for you. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 3:58

Which yeah we'll get there. But uh you weren't always queen of pre-sales. What was your first job?

SPEAKER_00 4:03

What was my first job?

SPEAKER_02 4:04

Yeah. Back in the I mean in the actual first job.

SPEAKER_00 4:07

So I did a yeah, I did some babysitting because that's what you do when you're, in my case, around 12, I think, or 13.

SPEAKER_02 4:15

That's about right.

SPEAKER_00 4:15

Right.

SPEAKER_02 4:15

Um my girl started.

SPEAKER_00 4:17

But my first job was um I went to Catholic school and Is that a job?

SPEAKER_02 4:21

I didn't think I got paid for that. I well That's context for the context. Rachel, young Rachel going to Catholic school.

SPEAKER_00 4:27

I went to Catholic school and um I got a phone call like just as I was about to graduate from eighth grade, go on to high school from the priest, and like the priest at the church was like the person that you don't get phone calls from. Sure, sure. That's a good thing. And he's like, Rachel, we'd like you to come work at the rectory. And I'm like, and that rectory is the place where the priests live, and there's an office attached to it because you know, at the end of the day, the the parish is is a is a business, and there's accountants and there's money and there's and in my case, there was a uh copy machine.

SPEAKER_02 5:00

Yeah. Which kids, back in the day, it's difficult. You just said that. I'm like, oh wow, copy machine. It's just wealth and power and business and yes.

SPEAKER_00 5:13

Yeah, and so what I did is I would come in after school and I would answer the phones, and I would come in on weekends and answer the phones, answer questions, pretty much sit around and watch TV, but just make sure that there was somebody manning, womaning, personing, crewing, crewing the um the phones at the rectory.

SPEAKER_02 5:31

Staffing. Okay, but not so much of making copies.

SPEAKER_00 5:34

Well, so that that was my that that was a side gig. So what I would do is I would get my books from school and then I would copy the uh the pages that I would need for that particular uh unit, and then I wouldn't have to take my whole book. I could just take the copies.

SPEAKER_02 5:46

Right, a lot lighter. Because it's you know backpack full of books.

SPEAKER_00 5:49

And they would feed me dinner sometimes, and like around Christmas, the priest would sometimes ask me to wrap packages for them. So I would just sit and wrap Christmas presents. Yes. Oh that's a good thing. Yeah, it was it was yeah, I was you know a receptionist for the most part. And I did that most through through um high school.

SPEAKER_02 6:06

All right, which led later to um Queen of Presales.

SPEAKER_00 6:10

I guess, yes.

SPEAKER_02 6:11

Through some series of steps that that's that'll be a separate episode.

SPEAKER_00 6:15

Something like that. Yeah, but uh I actually I started the the pre-sales um path as a um technical support engineer for a database company. And I actually got that job because I was dating a an accountant at the firm. It was a startup software company. Okay. It had just gone public and back in 90s, 97, um, you know, started not specified number of years ago.

SPEAKER_02 6:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 6:39

Uh he had brought me to a Christmas party and I met the head of technical support, and he's like, Oh, you know, what do you do? I said, Well, I just graduated from college, I have a degree in math, and I'm kind of looking for a job. And he's like, Well, would you like to answer phones in our technical support department? So again, this is a time where we actually had phones in a technical support department. And I said, sure. And I remember that the uh my interview, um, because the company was Red Brick and it was Ralph Kimball who was the father of data warehousing. Maybe you heard of him. Yep. And I so I got the data warehouse toolkit, the book, and during my interview, then they asked me questions like what's an index? You know, I'd go, I'd go to the page, the definitions page, and I'd read it. Because this is over the telephone. There's no Zoom. And so yeah, I cheated my way into my first uh database job.

SPEAKER_02 7:22

So kids before ChatGPT, where you could ask the question there, you'd just literally turn pages in the book. It was the same game, you know.

SPEAKER_00 7:29

Yeah. That's so that's wonderful. So so my real first job and took me into the industry was working for Red Brick back in the late 90s.

SPEAKER_02 7:37

Okay. Through one of the the founders of uh of Data Warehousing.

SPEAKER_00 7:40

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 7:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 7:42

Um and I haven't moved much from No, you've kind of been there.

SPEAKER_02 7:46

Yeah. Kimball and Bill Inman and Yep. Um Wow. Uh now, okay. So uh I guess briefly, where where are you where are you now?

SPEAKER_00 7:54

Oh, I am currently at a startup called Delta Stream. And Delta Stream is a stream processing platform that incorporates Apache Flink, um, Apache Spark, and um Clickhouse.

SPEAKER_02 8:05

There you go. Don't we all?

SPEAKER_00 8:07

Check it out. Link in the show notes.

SPEAKER_02 8:09

There you go. I actually didn't know didn't know Clickhouse was in there. Um what is whether it's at Delta Delta Stream, at probably not at the parish. What's the hardest technical problem you've ever solved? Now a quick word from our sponsor. Confluent Developer the Podcast is brought to you by Confluent Developer the website, which has everything you need as a developer of data streaming systems. And it's completely free. We've got curriculum, hands-on exercises, executable tutorials, the online data streaming engineer certification, also free, a way to find a meetup near you, those are free. Everything is there. I really want you to be successful in your journey as a data streaming engineer, and this is the site that has what you need. Check it out at developer.confluent.io. That's developer.confluent.io. Now back to the show.

SPEAKER_00 9:00

When you first came to me and asked me about this question, I was like, oh, hardest technical question. It's a tough one. It's a tough one because in a pre-sales environment, you are working in a very short framework, right? As we like to say, time kills all deals. So you are trying to prove value uh to the customer as fast as you possibly can and um with as little problems as possible.

SPEAKER_02 9:27

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:28

So you spend a lot of time to asking questions. A lot of time in what we call discovery.

SPEAKER_02 9:32

Uh okay, which is figuring out what their context problem, all that is, if you're a solution, if you're not a solution, all that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_00 9:40

Right, exactly. And and will and then what do they need to see in order for them to say, yeah, this is what we want to do? Basically getting to the technical yes.

SPEAKER_02 9:49

There you go.

SPEAKER_00 9:50

So because I worked for mostly for database companies, my hardest technical problems have always been performance.

SPEAKER_01 9:57

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 9:57

Where the customer has said, um, I have this type of box or cluster or whatever, and here's my SLA. Go show you.

SPEAKER_02 10:09

Make it work. Right. Show me when I push the button, the light comes on in the required amount of time.

SPEAKER_00 10:16

Right. And sometimes depending on the database, is it how many concurrent queries are you looking at, how many um simultaneous users? So there's a lot of different um, you know, are you using a mix of different types of workloads or different types of queries? So you kind of have to nail that down, and you're trying to nail it down so it's as favorable to you as possible.

SPEAKER_01 10:36

Right, right.

SPEAKER_00 10:37

Right. Um so the most difficult ones have always been these. And as soon as a customer is like, we don't want to spend a lot of money on hardware. This is all the hardware we have, and this is what we're trying to do. And you know, the marketing department of your company is saying that you're the world's fastest database or you're the most this, and you're just like must be true. Okay. Uh uh, okay. So um so are there SSDs? No, no, these are you know hard drives. And okay. And to use, uh, I think to quote uh Patrick McFadden back in the uh data stacks days, um, you know, they only spin so fast.

SPEAKER_02 11:14

That's that is a fact. They there is a certain rate that really hasn't changed in 30 years.

SPEAKER_00 11:18

Right.

SPEAKER_02 11:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:19

And uh so you actually go pretty quick into the JVM. And Okay. Yeah, and I'm not a developer. Like I don't write Java. Um, I've I I can read it. Sure. You don't want me anywhere near it. But for the most part, like I don't spend my life looking at memory um until I have to.

SPEAKER_01 11:39

Right.

SPEAKER_00 11:40

And so we're using things like flame graphs to try to figure out where their bottlenecks um and then pinpoint the processes that may like that are waiting, that are bottlenecked, that are um are starved for memories. And because I've also worked in mostly open source technologies.

SPEAKER_02 11:57

Yeah. And technology is the JVM, at least partially.

SPEAKER_00 12:01

Yeah, yeah, exactly. They're they're always Java. And and I I don't know if you know this, but open source uh technologies can kind of be hard to use.

SPEAKER_02 12:13

They can. They are not. They're typically, if they're infrastructure, they are designed for their non-functional characteristics, latency, scale, whatever, whatever, whatever the cool thing is in that space, messages per second, records, whatever, blah, blah, blah. They're really good at that. And you know, if you don't know how to use it, well, learn.

SPEAKER_00 12:32

And there's about a bazillion, is that is that a word? Like a bazillion different knobs that you can turn. And every knob was built for a particular reason in a particular use case. And sometimes you're looking at it going, I don't know, maybe I'll turn this one and see what happens. Ooh, maybe I'll turn that one and see what happens. And unless you're gonna go, you know, code diving to go find out if that knob is gonna actually help you with, you know, merge buffers, for example, or you know, client connections or something like that, then you are spending a lot of time going tweak, tweak, tweak, tweak.

SPEAKER_02 13:04

Yeah. Yeah. That's that's that's that's I mean, a lot of database tuning. I think anybody, regardless of the language, they're that's you know, you talk to some DBA who's gone deep on Oracle or whatever. It's uh it's a lot of that. And it's never nobody ever talks like favorably about that. Like, wow, it was such a rich time in my life when I was deep into whatever. So but JVM things, you're looking at uh at databases built on the JVM. Yeah, and so memory management, that's that's yeah, the thing. It it seems like I mean, I don't know if recent advancement advancements in garbage collection have made that less of a thing. I feel like I hear about it less.

SPEAKER_00 13:39

I think so. So but you know, back in my data stacks days, definitely, you know, tuning the heap.

SPEAKER_02 13:45

That was the thing.

SPEAKER_00 13:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 13:46

That was the limiting factor. I mean, we uh it's not a Cassandra podcast, but like storage was cheap enough and big enough that you could put too much disk in a Cassandra node for there to be JVM space to babysit the disk. There's a certain kind of memory load that a byte on disk needed, and you were really constrained by, you know, how big could a heap be at that time?

SPEAKER_00 14:10

Right. Well, and then but there's also the the the trade-off of you know, how often do you swap to disk, how much memory do you have available to you? And then like and I actually had to go back and look up some of this stuff after our conversation.

SPEAKER_02 14:24

After I I said I need to hear about your own. But it was definitely the hardest problem.

SPEAKER_00 14:30

Yeah, like do you like tune this bit and this bit? And I I actually ended up write writing a um a course on it for the rest of the pre-sales team. Nice. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 14:39

Gee, I, you know, they're welcome. I yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:43

Um so by the time we got to imply when I was working with Druid, which was a you know, a different type of database, but still a very, you know, you know, high performance um type of database, like, yeah, so JVM was a little easier to use. Um so you had and it's almost like you had less control over it. And so there was much more, there was a lot more knobs and dials that you had to use.

SPEAKER_02 15:08

Oh, okay.

SPEAKER_00 15:09

So that was so there was a trade-off, right? Rather than, as there always is, it seems like, you know, rather than having more control over the actual memory management in the JVM, you were actually doing more in the in the application itself.

SPEAKER_02 15:21

The database itself has to take on the complexity of things to tune to make the best use of this now more automated garbage collector.

SPEAKER_00 15:31

And and of course, I hadn't kept up on garbage collection in the intervening years.

SPEAKER_02 15:35

Sure. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:36

Yeah, no, it wasn't it wasn't high on my list, you know.

SPEAKER_02 15:38

No, because that as an SE uh dealing with a Cassandra-based product, that's gonna be a core skill, right? That's that's where your your life was in uh 2015. Um 2012 or whenever that was.

SPEAKER_00 15:52

This is 2013, yeah, yeah. Um and in the intervening lead years when I would move off of working with something that wasn't yeah, it wasn't uh it wasn't as necessary until it was. And then all of a sudden I'm like, oh darn it, I didn't uh yeah, I don't know what's going on again.

SPEAKER_02 16:07

So what's the what's the uh you're closing a deal. That's that's the thing, right? That's the the impact you're you're creating. Um but if you can think of one, you know, a specific example, like what was the situation, what were they upset about, what did you get to?

SPEAKER_00 16:22

Well, so yeah, I'll paint a little bit of a picture. This was a um so I am Pacific time zone based. Yes, you are. And I typically work for startups where I am um usually one of very few other sales engineers in the org.

SPEAKER_02 16:37

Yeah, you tend to be early stage type of.

SPEAKER_00 16:38

Yeah, early stage. And so um this particular company, um, this particular product that I was working with, I hadn't hired anybody in the India region yet. But this customer was in India. So fell on me.

SPEAKER_02 16:51

11 and a half hours.

SPEAKER_00 16:52

Exactly. And so it was you know two o'clock in the morning, and I have exactly two days left in order to prove this out, and we're not anywhere near it. And they will not budge on the size of their cluster. Like they're just like this is it. And um, you know, I'm trying to get the CTO on the phone who's you know the author of the product. Like nobody better to help me. And you know, he and I are you know looking at these flame graphs and uh you know running different um the commands. And um, I'm gonna say this was not a successful ending. So we actually lost the we lost the deal.

SPEAKER_02 17:31

Okay. This was a hard problem.

SPEAKER_00 17:33

It was a hard problem, and we lost the deal. Um, and sometimes it's like you you walk in going, well, we're gonna give it a go. Um, and luckily I had the the support of the CTO. Like I had the support of everybody around me.

SPEAKER_02 17:48

Of the database. That's the your CTO, not the data. Yeah, yeah, no, no.

SPEAKER_00 17:51

The customers the customer is just like, ah, it doesn't work. Sorry. We're not paying, we're not spending the money on it. Um, but it's not even that you're you so yeah, we lost the deal. We didn't, I mean, was it probably worth it in the long run? Probably. I mean, these guys were probably a difficult customer to continue to support.

SPEAKER_02 18:09

Okay, fair enough.

SPEAKER_00 18:10

Um so I can I can say that to me say that to make myself feel better. Um, but it it it was a loss. Yeah. And you know, not the not the greatest feeling in the world.

SPEAKER_02 18:20

No, you don't you don't get into pre-sales because you want to lose deals. That's that's how you get paid. But that's interesting that you've picked that one. I mean, I think that's kind of cool because sometimes uh that's how the story ends.

SPEAKER_00 18:30

This isn't a job interview. Like I'm not gonna tell you like this is how I just tell you how awesome I am.

SPEAKER_02 18:35

No, hardest problem ever kicked my butt.

SPEAKER_00 18:37

Yeah. And it kicked and oh I think what it comes down to is that there is always a sort of disconnect between marketing and sales and the technology.

SPEAKER_02 18:47

Oh, tell me. I need to hear more about this.

SPEAKER_00 18:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 18:50

Um and I didn't think that was true, by the way.

SPEAKER_00 18:52

No, never. No, no, no, that's never, never the issue.

SPEAKER_02 18:55

Crazy.

SPEAKER_00 18:56

Um and and as I've started, as I've you know, grown in my career and I've started working for smaller and smaller companies and had more and more responsibility, I start seeing how difficult marketing is for technology companies, especially at an early stage. And if you have an open source product, great. Like you have kind of a community that is giving you um signs, whether or not you have product market fit, what your product is going to be used for, how they're using it. And so I'm not I'm preaching to the choir on this one, right?

SPEAKER_02 19:25

Well, no, but I'm not maybe not to them. It's it it's this free way of adopting and and actually using in anger the product, uh, at least the open source version of it, something very similar. And so you really do get a strong signal of, well, where is that finding itself when the cost of the product itself is zero? Who uses it and for what? It's brilliant.

SPEAKER_00 19:46

Yeah, and and it it tells you so much. Now, if you don't have that already, right, if you're trying to sell a product that isn't open source, then what do you do? Like, how do you define if you have product market fit? How do you define who your target customers are? How do you define the parameters in which you're gonna be working in? And and and the yes, the the the product that I was an open source product, so people did know what it was being used for. But I think in general, I'm talking more about you know trying to explain to technical founders who are engineers and they're usually brilliant engineers, um, you know, why do you need marketing and what's the point of marketing and how do you most effectively utilize marketing uh to you know to grow your your go-to-market strategy.

SPEAKER_02 20:37

Yeah, to grow your business.

SPEAKER_00 20:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:38

And I I I came up in this business as an engineer. I I my job I had in college was writing software. I talked about that on an episode. Um and that's that's what I did in the early, I don't know, 15, 20 years of my career is I I wrote code and without a lot of connection to the go-to-market part of the business. I worked for some small companies where I saw selling happen, but I didn't know what in early in my career there was no SaaS, but like, you know, now as we know it, sort of this kind of software company's marketing, enterprise marketing. I didn't know what that was. And and developer type people, you know, like me, before I knew that, marketing just means like untrustworthy, not smart person. Yeah, that's that's how it gets, it's terrible, but that's how it just if you just listen, that's how it gets used.

SPEAKER_00 21:26

But it's so wrong because so wrong. Because, and again, as a sales engineer, I'm the tip of the spear, right? I'm in there having to prove to somebody that the product does what marketing says it does.

SPEAKER_02 21:35

It's technical credibility.

SPEAKER_00 21:37

Right.

SPEAKER_02 21:37

Key.

SPEAKER_00 21:38

Yeah, exactly. Um, so I have not only do I have to believe it, and I'm definitely have to have to drink the Kool-Aid, but I have to have tried it, I have to have experienced it, and I have to be able to walk in there, you know, with some swagger and say, yeah, this is going to work.

SPEAKER_02 21:50

Yeah. And so you have these technical founders in these early stage startups in the world that you inhabit who are engineers. That's the background they come from, and they're you know, maybe genius. Coder who built amazing product.

SPEAKER_00 22:02

They are usually.

SPEAKER_02 22:03

Usually. And uh now they're gonna learn how business works. What's a marketing? Uh that's dumb guys. I don't know. We don't need that.

SPEAKER_00 22:09

Seriously, there is and I and I'm not gonna name names, but I've had conversations with founders. Like one of them said to me, Um, oh, I don't think we should do trade shows. I went to a trade show once. It was really boring.

SPEAKER_02 22:18

Uh-huh.

SPEAKER_00 22:19

I've worked sorry, I worked a trade show booth once, and it was really boring.

SPEAKER_02 22:22

There you go.

unknown 22:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:24

Yeah. And so when you when you go up against that mentality, you have to fix that. Well, and you're trying to, you know, you're you're trying to build a go-to-market strategy. And you, you know, part of that go-to market strategy is going to go find your target market where they live, and where they live is it live events. They live at conferences. That's one, it's one of them. Not maybe. Maybe, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 22:43

But you need to learn that.

SPEAKER_00 22:44

Right. And so having a founder who's like, well, I just think that's what that's dumb. Well, okay. Yeah. So we're gonna go have to talk about we're gonna have to have that talk.

SPEAKER_02 22:54

Schools in session.

SPEAKER_00 22:55

Right. Yeah. So this is a talk.

SPEAKER_02 22:57

Another talk about this is how you sell things to customers.

SPEAKER_00 23:02

Right.

SPEAKER_02 23:03

Uh this sounds like another hard problem that you've solved.

SPEAKER_00 23:07

Yeah, and actually, when you first said what was your hard problem you solved, that was the one. It's another story. Another founder I'm talking to, and we're I'm trying to explain to him how do we find product market fit. And I said, you know, and then and typically at a bigger company, because he'd worked at bigger companies, you know, you would have somebody in product marketing help out with this. And and he starts laughing. I'm like, what are you laughing about? He goes, product marketing, that's not a thing. Well, and I'm like, oh. So he said and so I tried to explain, right? There's you know, these there's different, you know, sections of marketing and they do different things, and you have product marketing that is like the technical side of it. And he's like, Are you serious? Like I thought all marketing was just marketing.

SPEAKER_02 23:55

It's just marketing, you know.

SPEAKER_00 23:57

It's just marketing, right? Right. And over and over again, I see heads of marketing who are brilliant people who have a lot of great ideas, but running into loggerheads to this the technical founder who doesn't either doesn't understand the value of marketing, wants to underinvest in marketing. And I'm gonna tell you, if you don't have an open source product, you you have to mark you have to spend that same amount of money in marketing.

SPEAKER_02 24:20

Yeah. Um lot of work you have to do.

SPEAKER_00 24:23

Yeah, unless you just lucky enough to have a product that everybody wants and Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 24:31

And that's that's pretty unusual. Right. Then you can't you can't fail even in spite of yourself.

SPEAKER_00 24:36

Right. And so product market fit is what we call it in the industry. And finding that and explaining to founders, especially when they're doing, you know, they're doing founder sales, right? They've gotten a seed around or they've gotten an A round because they've gotten some friends and family maybe to buy the product. And um that's I mean, that's great, but it's not it's not repeatable, right? You need a repeatable business.

SPEAKER_01 25:06

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 25:06

And they're like, well, I was able to sell this, why can't you? Well, it's a little bit different. And um, so that is, I think, in my career, has been the hardest problem.

SPEAKER_02 25:16

I I believe it. And it the the crazy thing is, uh if if you can get them to that aha moment, if you come up in your career as an engineer, um, and then you actually learn how you watch enterprise marketing, uh, even a mediocre team functioning, um you just have no idea how disciplined and quantitative and methodical it is. And as an engineer, you're like, I can't, I couldn't predict how long it's gonna take me to build something. Ugh. You know, but but the the kind of predictability that I said, even a kind of a middling marketing team and the amount of data, it's this amazingly quantitative thing that technical people kind of look on with disdain. And in fact, it's it's in a sense the the execution of that work feels like it it conforms more to the expectations and and bent of a technical person anyway. Um so that it just I remember that aha moment for myself.

SPEAKER_01 26:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:17

Um and it actually happened, fairly happened late in my career. It was just it was just about six months ago. Um, it's at Data Stacks. Uh if you look at the my history prior to that, there was just no big enterprise. And I'm looking at this like, oh wow. Yeah, it's actually kind of a cool thing.

SPEAKER_00 26:31

Yeah. And it's when it's done well, it's amazing. But the problem is it's really hard to do well because you're flying blind. You're, you know, you're going into a room and going, okay, I think this type of person's gonna want this thing. And so how do you reach them? Do you reach them through ads? Do they hang out on LinkedIn? Do they hang out in Slack? Like, where do these people hang out? How do you reach them? Knowing that all in that most engineers are gonna be like, oh, that's marketing. I don't want that marketing. Yeah. Oh, yeah, we don't, we don't. So how do you market to somebody who doesn't want to be marketed to?

SPEAKER_02 27:03

Well, now it sounds like I'm the guest. That's that's that's kind of kind of what DevRel does. And yeah, you spend some time doing that same thing yourself. That will have to be for another episode.

SPEAKER_00 27:14

I think so.

SPEAKER_02 27:15

My guest today has been Rachel Pedresky. Rachel, thanks for being a part of Conflow Developer.

SPEAKER_00 27:19

Thank you for having me.