The POWER of Customer Conversations 🗣️ ft. Anis Bennecaur | Revenue Reimagined Ep. 025

Anis Bennecaur, multi-time founder and CEO of Attention, shares the raw realities of scaling a successful B2B SaaS company from the ground up. Drawing from his experience bootstrapping his first startup and now building a hyper-growth AI platform, he emphasizes the importance of securing genuine product-market fit before hitting the gas on growth, treating the first startup experience like 'crashing your first car' to learn how to drive. A core theme of Anis's philosophy is ruthless prioritization and ignoring the competition. Instead of getting distracted by feature parity, he advocates for building from first principles and dedicating engineering resources only to the subset of customers who 'live in the future.' He also breaks down his 'growth stacking' methodology: finding manual outbound motions that win, and only then using AI to scale them, rather than using AI to automate bad messaging. Finally, Anis doesn't shy away from controversial hiring takes. He actively seeks candidates on a 'quest for excellence' who treat their roles with the obsession of a world-class chess player. He prioritizes extreme dedication and rapid iteration over traditional work-life balance in the early startup phases, demanding a team that is constantly looking for ways to improve by 1% every single day.

Discussed in this episode

• Why founders should view their first startup as buying a first car, using early bumps to learn how to drive better.
• The critical advice to hold off on scaling sales and marketing until true product-market fit is achieved.
• Why pivoting Attention's core feature from real-time coaching to CRM automation within eight weeks drove massive adoption.
• The danger of building feature parity with competitors instead of listening strictly to your own customers' pain points.
• How to execute 'growth stacking' by mastering a manual outreach channel before adding automation or new funnels.
• The trap of using AI to scale bad messaging, and why sales reps must first write 200 manual cold emails.
• The strategy of dedicating 50% of engineering resources to the 10% of customers who live in the future.
• Hiring for a 'quest for excellence' by selecting talent obsessed with their craft rather than strict work-life balance.

Episode highlights

1. 0:00 — Introduction and Anis's background
2. 1:45 — The origin story of Attention
3. 3:30 — Lessons from first vs second startups
4. 5:15 — Achieving PMF before accelerating growth
5. 8:00 — Pivoting rapidly based on user feedback
6. 10:30 — Ignoring competitors to build from first principles
7. 13:20 — Growth stacking vs growth hacking
8. 15:45 — Why AI shouldn't scale bad messaging
9. 19:15 — Differentiating customer signal from noise
10. 21:00 — Hiring talent obsessed with excellence
11. 24:30 — Rapid fire questions and wrap up

Key takeaways

• Reach product-market fit before scaling.
• Ignore competitors; build from first principles.
• Master manual motions before using AI.
• Focus engineering on future-living customers.
• Hire for a quest for excellence.

Transcript

Yeah, so think of uh starting as starting your first startup as buying your first car, right? You're going to bump everywhere, you're going to crash it a few times, not too hard, but still, you're going to learn a lot. Welcome back to another episode of the Revenue Reimagined podcast. We are so lucky to have with us today, um, one of my friends, arguably the co-founder and CEO of what I think is the best, and I'm going to pigeonhole it, he will tell me not to, conversational intelligence platforms out there.

Uh, but we have Anice Bennesour with us, who is the co-founder and CEO of Attention, was also formerly the co-founder and CEO of Mixer, where he had an exit, and did a good amount of growth for a small little company, um, some of you might have heard of, called Tinder. Uh, that is not where Dale and I met. Uh, but Anice, welcome to the show, man. Thank you.

Excited to be here. We're glad to have you. I mean, we got to put up with Dale, but we're glad to have you here. It is true.

It is true. How's everything going, Anice? Appreciate you joining us. Good, good, thank you.

I'm in Miami right now, based in New York, but uh in Miami at a customer's office for the day. You should go visit Adam. I know. I know.

We we we we we already talked about this, Dale. because you were late. Yeah. good, good.

Yeah. Awesome. So, one of the things we love to talk about with founders is, what's the origin story of attention? Like, why'd you start it?

What was the the genesis of it? So, tell us a little bit about the origin story. Yeah, absolutely. So, I thought before attention, I founded another startup called Mixer.

It was a professional network for creative. She has LinkedIn for people in the creative space. And at one point, we're scaling all of our sales, um, and hired a head of sales, uh, over at Mixer. We were selling subscriptions, she has LinkedIn job postings, but for our own platform, to companies like Capital One, Square, Havass Media, and so on.

And when we were selling to all these customers, especially when the pandemic hit, uh, we all started selling via Zoom. It was impossible to understand, uh, what was happening within our deals. Our CRM was always empty. There are so many challenges that we dealt with as a startup, and we started to look into how we could fix those problems, right?

Uh, and by, um, trying to stitch things together at the time, we realized that this could be a product. At the same time, I met with, uh, my biggest competitor, uh, the founder of a startup called, uh, Swipecast, and that guy is Matthias, my current co-founder today. Uh, when we met, I realized that he had the exact same challenges, despite us being sitting at the different side of the tables. And we realized that we were both trying to solve the same challenges, um, while not being at the same companies.

So, um, we decided to start Attention together, a year later, and that the reason why we started it was to fix our problems, uh, within our our previous startup. So, I'm biased. Um, I am a longtime Attention user. Um, I think it is, as I said, the best platform out there for a plethora of reasons, other than the fact that it records my calls, which I think is like such a minute portion of what you do.

But one of the things that intrigues me and intrigued me to work with you, Anice, is that you're a multi-time founder, right? Like, this isn't your first rodeo. And I think a lot of first-time founders, um, they they they struggle with how to get it right in that first build. What to do, what not to do because there's so many assumptions and what industry best practices or VCs telling you, go hire 15 sales reps and just sell.

Talk to us, you know, as you're, you know, in startup number two, what are some of these assumptions that you've kind of said, fuck it, I'm not going to do this the traditional way and I'm going to do this my way that is allowing you to see the growth that you're seeing at Attention. Yeah, so think of uh starting as starting your first startup as buying your first car, right? You're going to bump everywhere, you're going to crash it a few times, not too hard, but still, you're going to learn a lot. And you're going to be a better driver and then you get a second nicer car.

Um, it's exactly the same, right? Over at Mixer, especially, it was a bootstrapped business. We had to think very deeply about how to grow our business profitably in the most in the most efficient, uh, possible ways. And after doing that for six years, it makes you a warrior, right?

A, and also B, uh, I mean, man, there were like tough times where I had to eat just pasta with butter every single day to My kid loves pasta with butter. To just make too, too. you know, other entrepreneurs, maybe they can just work in the entrepreneur space. You go through really tough times.

And at that point, you actually just start thinking with the most intensity and passion about how to run your startup. And that those are things that not only, you know, from best practice perspective, but also how to think about things perspective. You end up being a better second time founder. So the things were, A, uh, get to product market fit before you hit the accelerator on growth.

And when I spoke with Matthias before we started Attention, he had the exact same lesson. We sat over coffee and I asked him, hey, what are the top ten lessons that you learned from your first startup? And he said, hit the accelerator on growth after you reach PMF. That was the biggest one, right?

Then there are other things which included hire excellent talent and don't be afraid to pay uh over market prices to get the right types of people because the cost of MS higher will kill your company. So, about seven out of those ten were the exact same and and today basically the way we we operate is A, we we really try to go for from first principles. We think especially with AI, the world is changing. There's there are so many, you know, hypothesis that have to be questioned.

And so, how do you go back to first principles? How do you try to operate differently? And this is how we spend 99% of our time just trying to think. You know, we every morning we come up with shower thoughts about, hey, maybe we should try to do these things differently.

And and that might create different results. Um, when it comes to VCs, at the end of the day, we have a great relationship with our VCs, Iniac, and whenever we walk into a meeting, I feel like we both learn from each other. It's not just us learning from them, but also us teaching them things about, uh, our discoveries, and that has been a great relationship. And at the end of the day, I think that's how most founder relationships should be with our VCs.

I love that. So, you go through, so you talked about dealing with setbacks and and having those challenges. Share one moment in the journey, whether Attention or even earlier, that things didn't go as planned and and the navigation that you did to change that setback into a setup and lessons you learned. Yeah, of course.

I think in order to be successful, you have to iterate as many times as possible and as quickly as possible. And so, I'll I'll just take the example with Attention, where, um, in order to get initial early strong customer traction, you need to get to the best early product as possible. And so, initially, we when building Attention, we were thinking about two things. A, real-time sales coaching and B, filling up your CRM.

We started with real-time sales coaching, and within four to eight weeks, putting this in the hands of users, we realized that it didn't have as strong as as a product market fit than filling up the CRM. So, within those within those eight weeks, we said to ourselves, you know what, let's just actually just put 100% of our efforts into filling your Salesforce or your your HubSpot, based on what's happening in those conversations. And that's where very quickly our users said, hey, I love this, and start giving us a lot more feedback instead of pulling radio silence on the on the silent on us, right? And so, that early setback just got us to pivot very quickly and just put all of our efforts into something that was going to have higher PMF.

So, product market fit, PMF, is arguably the single most important thing you need as a founder in a startup. Dale and I talk about it all the time, all day, with multiple founders that are clients or aren't clients, every single day. And you did something kind of interesting, and I I'd love to know your thought process here. Like, you're in a really hyper-competitive space, right?

Like, you compete against people that are very well known, that have very big brands, and you're winning. What made you decide to go into that space and compete against the big boys, and how are you distinguishing and changing your go-to-market motion to win against them when no one else has been able to do that? Yeah, that's a really interesting one. Believe it or not, I have no idea of what competitor platforms look like.

You know, and that allowed us to just build from first principles, as I was saying earlier, and just trying to understand the the way we've been building is just talk to customers, identify what's missing for them, what are the biggest gaps, and build, right? And so, that allowed us to just keep building at the end of the day, you know, what Paul Graham says is, just ignore your competitors, you know, most startups just die by suicide instead of, um, anything else. So, that's how we've been building, you know, just talk to to your customers, understand what is their single biggest pain point, and build on that. And at the end of the day, that's how we've been building our product and ignoring every single competitive feature, just and and that's worked out for us, right?

Just keep releasing in public. Whenever we have a new feature, just we release it very publicly on LinkedIn. We get people very excited, and then we keep selling. And we've always ignored competition.

I I think that's super important because I think you can always try to figure out the me too, or I got to get a different feature, or what's that feature functionality, whereas if you do it from a mindset of what the industry's asking for without having bias towards a product that's already in the market, it's super important. I think too many too many companies try to do me too, following up versus like something that is going to change the trajectory of the market, which is the same thing when you're looking to grow the company. Like from a go-to-market perspective, it could be like, we should do it just because X, Y, Z company did it. But the growth hack that you guys are doing in the go-to-market is like super interesting to us.

So, talk to us a little bit about your growth hacks and and the thought process in growth hacking your go-to-market. Yeah, absolutely. So, first of all, I'll just add to what you said that most I think that most companies don't even really know what their customers need and try to build, you know, feature parity with their competition. And my co-founder Matthias always said, hey, if you just try to figure out feature parity, by the time you get there, your competitors will be far ahead in front of you, right?

So, we've just tried to build just listening to our customers and ignoring whatever else is happening, you know, within competition. Uh, now when it comes to growth hacking, uh, what I like the way I like to call it is is growth stacking, right? You have a lot of different funnels of acquisition. And you have to run as many experiments as possible.

So, you go with one funnel. It works, you you end up figuring out that it works really well, you keep going on it and you double down on it. And by the time you have everything automated, you add the second stack of growth funnel and the third one and so on. And so, in the early days, we started selling just, you know, doing, uh, LinkedIn cold outbound.

And because I had a pretty good LinkedIn profile, people were interested in talking to me. So that was a good first funnel. Then we added, uh, LinkedIn posting. You know, I'll just post very publicly about our features and that would just resonate very well with the market and get us a ton of leads.

And then we added, um, cold outbound via emails, and then we added ads, and then we added a lot of different, uh, funnels, and we we just doubled down on whatever is winning. Now, when it comes to growth hacking, I could talk about this for ages, but the main thing is try to think about what really works manual at a manual level, right? How do you reach out to a person just manually? And then you try to think about how you can replicate those things using AI, not the opposite.

What I see in the market there is a lot of people try to think, hey, what can AI do at scale? But you know what? If your messaging sucks and you do it with AI at scale, it's always going to suck. So You're just gonna have scaled shitty messaging.

Exactly. And people are gonna hate you. So, um, no, just think about how you can write something very compelling, and then replicate that very compelling message. And so, when my reps joined Attention, the first thing I had them do is, hey, you're gonna write your first 200, uh, cold emails manually, we're gonna figure out what what emails worked out really well, and then we'll start replicating them with AI.

I love that. And it worked out really well. I love that. Growth hacking through growth stacking.

I like it. You know, it's it's funny when you talk about it like there's so many startups out there, big and small that want to compare themselves to others or focus on what others are doing and how you find that parity. And I'll I'll even admit like I'm guilty of that, right? Like I sent Dale a text this weekend over someone that arguably competes with us, um, with some snide ass comment that I made.

Um, and Dale was like, why are you even wasting the energy on this? Like, go back to fucking building. Um, and and don't consume yourself with it. And it it took me a minute because my initial reaction anytime Dale criticizes me is to tell him that he's wrong, which he usually is.

Um, but in this case it was like, like, you're right. Like, what do I care? Because if I'm so focused on what they are or are not doing, what I'm not doing is building our business. Um, or I'm just trying to focus on the people that they're speaking to, which may or may not be the people we speak to.

So I love that you kind of talk about how that's not the guiding principle and that you don't focus on the competitors of the world. But I'd, Anice, I'd imagine as successful as Attention is, like, it's not all rainbows and unicorns, right? Like there's gotta be times where you look back, um, something was going wrong, something was about to break, and you're like, shit, that was that critical inflection point, right? Like I made a decision and it changed the trajectory of either Attention or Mixer to be honest, because what we're trying to do is speak to founders who just are going through this and don't know how.

I I'd love to talk through what one of those decisions or inflection points was where you look back and you're like, this changed the trajectory of the company for better or for worse, because the follow-up is going to be what would you have done differently. Ever feel like keeping your CRM updated with call notes is a nightmare? You're not alone. Most sales leaders would rate their CRM hygiene a four out of ten.

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attention.tech. Yeah, that's a great question. Um, Most of mine are.

I'm sorry you have to deal with Dale's questions. So, I would say that, um, either for product for growth, um, every single day we think I think what really changes everything for us as founders, but also as a team is that we think about and very deeply about our business. Every single time we question every single hypothesis, and it can be during the weekend or after work hours, we always come back and regroup the next day with, hey, I just had this to shower thought, right? That's really important because that shows how involved everyone is with the business.

Now, when it comes to rethinking those hypotheses and kind of fixing whatever's whatever breaks, we operate very quickly, right? Like, I see that, let's say, in the last four weeks, someone from my team has not been selling the right way, has been doing something wrong. You know what? I'm gonna I'm not gonna give it a quarter to fix it.

I'm we're gonna fix it within the next two to four weeks. That's how quickly we have to iterate. And that's and if within four weeks, these things have not been fixed, and we don't focus on a million things. We focus on one single thing that that person has to change in order to, uh, improve things, right?

And so, at the end of the day, if you force your team to be in the mindset of improving 1% every single day, and looking back into how they can make things much better, then at that point, you have a winning team. When I go back into the example of, you know, pivoting in our early days and, you know, putting more of our efforts into CRM hygiene instead of, uh, uh, real-time coaching, we made that decision within four to six weeks. We collected the feedback from users, we realized that they were not as passionate as they were, and also sales were not going as fast as we wish they went. So, very quickly, Matthias and I sat down and we said, hey, you know what?

We already have this infrastructure. Only the only thing we have to do, this low-hanging fruit, is capturing these transcripts and leveraging AI to fill up your CRM. And we built it, we we validated this with customers. We said, hey, this is how we're gonna do.

We're gonna first sell, then we're gonna build very quickly and ship, and then we're gonna iterate. We did that, and that allowed us to move very quickly. Always validate things with your customers, try to sell it, try to see if people are willing to spend money to to based on whatever idea you have. And then if you're able to do it very quickly and you see kind of like there's sparkle in their eyes, you're going to be able to be successful.

Yeah, 100%. And so, going off of that trend, I heard something from, um, from a leader one time that basically said, it doesn't really matter if it's a startup or not, but I think it's more relevant than a startup. If you don't wake up every day trying to put yourself out of business, like someone's going to put you out of business, right? And so, what are you guys doing from a future perspective?

Because you're delivering, delivering, delivering for what's happening. But what are you guys do as an organization, or as a leadership team, or do you do it as a leadership team to wake up every morning and put yourself out of business? I think when you had when you were bootstrapping a business for six years, you you that that just ends up being muscle memory, right? Uh, and so, my biggest thought today is, how do I make sure that everyone in the team is, uh, voting to the same, you know, mindset?

Um, and so, we our team is in office in New York, and we make sure that, you know, within our conversations, every we build this every single day within their mindset, and we get them to think the exact same way as we do, which is, hey, tell me, read this read this uh article, listen to this podcast, try to think about, uh, what they're saying and try to see how we can affect the way you're doing things, right? Uh, that's the first thing. The second thing is, um, just Matthias and I, my co-founder, we text all every single hour, you know, outside of work hours. He's the the the last text I send before going to bed and the first text I see when I wake up in the morning, before going to the office, and it's just kind of like having this echo chamber chamber of us talking about these things all the time just makes us think about this with a lot of obsession.

The last thing, and that's kind of actually the most important one is, always talk to your customers. So, you have to make sure that you're taking the right feedback. How do you differentiate signal from noise, right? And what we kind of finally figured out is there a subset of our customers who can actually live in the future.

It's kind of like 10% of those customer of that customer base, and those customers will actually talk to them very frequently. We'll get their ideas on certain things. We'll actually listen to them a lot more than some other ones. A lot of customers will ask you to build table stakes things, right?

And if there's a massive need, we'll end up building them, but we we save 50% of our engineering resources listening to those customers that live in the future, and we try to validate things with them. That's the important part. Like out of everything you were just saying, like, I think tactically if founders are listening, save 50% of your engineering resources for the for the customers that are actually deriving future value for your organization. Yeah, it's it's the age-old adage, right?

Is is it loud or is it important? Just because someone is screaming that they want this feature, doesn't mean that it's important and that it's going to be something that's going to benefit the larger customer base that you should be spending engineering time time on, um, it could just be something that one person wants. I um, I love the fact that you guys are the first and last text. I'm now going to now going to text Dale every morning when I wake up, and I'm going to send him a goodnight text every single night before I go to sleep.

And he thinks I'm kidding, and he's shaking his head, but I'm going to start sending him goodnight texts every single night. Until I until I put him on do not disturb every night. Hmm, something tells me I'm in your favorites. How do you, Anice, when you're interviewing, and this is something I think a lot of founders struggle with, right?

Like I I probably field four to six calls a week from founders about interviewing. How do you as a startup leader find the right talent that's going to cut it in the startup space? Because and I'll take I'll take heat for this, not everyone is made for the startup space. Let's just be real.

Yeah, of course. Um, two things. A, I filter for uh quest for excellence. That's the biggest thing.

Have they proven in their lives in the past or in the interview today that they're on a quest for excellence? Are they trying to be the top 1% or 0.1% in what they do? Um, and if they are, if they're obsessed with their current job, their current role, whatever they're doing, at being the actual best in the world, then that's going to be really good, right?

The second thing and they have to think about it with the same obsession as a world-class chess player. That's how I view it. You have to always kind of think about strategies and things to always uh keep self-improving. The second thing, and again, I'm gonna get a lot of backlash for this one is I try not to get people who speak too much about work-life balance.

Uh, if you care about work-life balance, go work at Google or uh meta or one of those great companies. If you come and work with us, you have to give it your 120%. You have to work 10 to 12 hours a day, and you have to also be available on weekends when I message you. Um, I know a lot of people might not want this, and that's okay, they can work for other companies, but I want people who are obsessed with their jobs.

And I think so the very first job I had was in mergers and acquisitions, uh, back in France. And I was working insane, uh, insane weeks, right? And that just made me who I am today. So, I want people who are just obsessed with their jobs, obsessed with being the best at what they do.

We are uh we are huge at with give to get at Revenue Reimagined. One of the things that we pride ourselves on is giving back to our audience. Um, and my understanding is you've been gracious enough to give away something that you'd like to share with a member of our audience. So, I know I didn't do that in as scripted as a voice as my lovely co-host normally does.

Um, but what have you decided to share with our with with our folks, man? Yeah, of course. So, one of the things that I was talking about earlier was being world-class at one thing. And the one thing that I think I'm world-class at is growth hacking.

So, anyone who wants to get a one-on-one session with me on growth hacking, I'll be more than happy to give that away for free. Nice. Very nice. I I might want to sit in on that because I think what people don't realize is whether you are a two-person, um, special ops team that's building out, um, support for founders, whether you are a, you know, venture back company, whether you are a public company, um, growth hacking is something that we could uh, we could all use.

What do you uh, what do you say we jump into some rapid fire? Go for it. All right. If you weren't in tech, you can't work in tech anymore, what profession are you going to go do?

Well, if I had to redo all of my life, I would probably try to be a rock star. Um, that would have been my life dream, being Julian Casablancas, uh, from The Strokes. Otherwise, um, I would have probably, uh, done Does VC count as an answer? Sure.

All right. Well, VC. Cool. Nice.

I love it. What's the most used emoji in your work chats? Uh, the lightning bolt out of the Attention logo. Nice.

That's a good one. What that is a good one. Anice, what's the most unusual item that we could find on your desk back in the office in New York? Uh, candies.

That's not unusual. What what's what's what's your candy of choice? Um, sweet tarts, uh, ropes, uh, cherry or watermelon. My mom or my girlfriend would kill me if they heard that.

Nice. Checkers or chess? Uh, chess. Yeah, that's what I thought.

Strategy. Other than the Revenue Reimagined podcast, what's your favorite book or podcast related to entrepreneurship? Yeah, um, I've been listening a lot actually, uh, so Revenue Reimagined is within my top three. I love the I was going to send you a screenshot of that within my We don't even pay you to say that shit.

We actually we did have someone send it to us, uh, they were our we were number one in their Spotify list. Yeah. Super cool. I'll say Harry Stebbings uh podcast is great.

Um, 20 minutes to VC, I think it's called. That one is also within my top three. Uh, within books, I would say I love, um, I loved, um, Amp It Up by, um, Frank Slootman. I read it recently.

Awesome. Last one. Dream vacation destination. Um, I want to be on a beach and just like clear my mind and not do anything.

Love that. Hence why hence why you're in Florida. Nice. Anice, thank you so much for joining, man.

Where uh where can folks find you? Where can folks find more information about Attention? Shameless plug time, sir. Yeah, of course.

So our website is attention.tech. T E C H as in technology. Um, you can add me on LinkedIn.

Please do not email me. My inbox is destroyed. Uh but add me on LinkedIn. Follow me on LinkedIn.

Anice Bennessar, you'll find me easily there. Awesome. Anice, thank you so much for joining. We appreciate it.

Uh if you have not checked out Attention, go check it out. I said it at the start. I said it in the middle. I'll say it again.

It is the best platform out there. I do not make any money saying this. Go check out the platform. It's really super cool.

Thanks for joining us, man. Thank you guys.