The Antidote Ep 5 - Out with go-to-market, in with go-to-network, with Mac Reddin
📝 Episode Summary
Have you seen dinos floating around Linkedin lately? 🦕 In the fifth episode of The Antidote, Mac Reddin, founder of Commsor and self-titled “Rey de Dinos”, joins Alex for a conversation about the shift from go-to-market to go-to-network and its positive long term effects in the success of any business. Mac unveils how the team at Commsor pulled off a massive product launch campaign - without spending a dollar - and how relationship building skills can make or break your pipeline. As Mac reflects on Commsor’s journey - and his own as a founder -, he reinforces how important community, collaboration and people are. Businesses are important, but the people who help build them are essential.
🤓 What will I learn
✅ What is a go-to-network strategy and how it can lead to better business results
✅ How Commsor launched a viral product without spending a cent
✅ Why harnessing the power of your brand can fuel your inbound engine
✅ What a founder's journey looks like and the differences between VC, bootstrapped, and venture strapped startups
👀 Key Insights
1. The go-to-network strategy
For Mac, the go-to-market approach is broken. It’s a transactional strategy that sees buyers as numbers and forgets about the human side of marketing and sales. For Commsor’s Rey de Dinos, the future is go-to-network.
But what is go-to-network? It’s all about the people you surround your business with - a network of champions, partners, creators, influencers, fans, advisors, ambassadors, etc - that you can market with and through.
And how can you implement a go-to-network strategy in your company?
“It doesn't start with tooling. It starts with a mindset shift (...) around building a relationship with people and actually coming at it with this authentic approach versus just this sell it all cost mentality, which is what we were all doing for 10 years, up until two years ago. (...) And when I say you have to go at it with this intent of building relationships, that doesn't mean go make friends with your prospects, but it means be a real person, build an authentic relationship.”
So don’t forget: it’s not about you, it’s about your buyers. Making this mindset shift will allow you to become more successful in the long term, and you might end up making some valuable friends along the way as well!
2. How to build demand through brand
“95% of buyers are not ready to buy right now.” Every marketer and seller out there has heard and referenced this stat in recent years. But what are we actually doing about it?
For Mac (and we couldn’t agree more), focusing on the 5% who are ready to buy can only take you so far. What really makes the difference - and gets you long term success - is a focus on authenticity, relationships and value. Building connections and an authentic community with your buyers can compound over time, and have a positive impact in your brand and in your revenue! Even if your prospects are not ready to buy now, no one knows what they’ll want/will be able to do tomorrow. And no one knows if they’re acquaintances with someone who might be ready to buy.
“But if you build a network…maybe you will never buy from me. Maybe the timing will never be right, the budget won't ever be there, but maybe at your next job, you'll buy from us because you like us and you've got the brand affinity and you've gotten to know us”.
3. AI: friend or foe?
AI is the word of the day and every month we see companies launching new AI products that all promise to change how it’s done. For Mac though, it’s not that simple.
While AI might be useful to do more mundane and repetitive tasks, such as researching prospects or analyzing data, Mac believes human connections are key to building relationships.
“I think a lot of people are over indexing on AI. And I think there's a place for it. I think AI for research is great, but if I found out that a seller was using AI to talk to me, I wouldn't wanna talk to that seller. Have you seen the movie Thelma and Louise? It's like marketing and sales. They're sitting in a car, they know that they are heading towards a cliff, but they're still debating how to make the car go faster instead of trying to turn the car. And it's like they don't even realize it, they're devouring themselves. They're increasing the volume, they're increasing the noise, they're creating the very system which is causing the system not to work.”
What do you think about it?
▶️ Watch the full episode on Youtube:
📖 Transcript
Alex Olley (00:01.75)
So Mac, welcome to The Antidote. How are you doing, man? And what's been keeping you busy?
Mac Reddin (00:06.72)
I'm good, I would say my answer to how I'm doing is I'm busy. So it's a very fitting question. Oh, so many things. I think the big thing right now is, the best way I can sum up the last two weeks for me is that a few days ago, somebody filled in a question in our live support chat saying that our demo request form was broken. And I spent like an hour, I'd be like, how is it broken, digging into it? Oh, it wasn't broken, it's just all the available time for the next three weeks was taken.
Which is, I guess, a great problem to have. We did our big public reveal two and a half weeks ago. So there's been a lot more interest than we thought. So a lot of what’s keeping me busy right now is calls and I'm the idiot who moved to Europe, so I'm doing a lot of calls and demo calls and onboarding calls at 8 PM, 9 PM, 10 PM, 11 PM, you know, proper, proper founder life stuff.
Alex Olley (00:37.01)
Well, that takes me back to about five or six years ago when I was doing the same. So I was in London selling into the U.S. I know exactly how you feel, by the way. You don't look tired somehow. You look pretty fresh.
Mac Reddin (01:10.49)
No, no, no. Luckily, my superpower, I don't know if that's one of the questions for later, my superpower is I genuinely only need four or five hours of sleep a night. Not from a hustle culture way. I've been that way since I was 10 years old. That's just no alarm clock. That's just how I am.
Alex Olley (01:19.46)
I see. Lucky you, man. I need at least seven or eight hours of sleep. So I'm on the other side.
Mac Reddin (01:27.89)
Yeah. It's a good founder superpower to have. An extra two or three hours a day is literally a superpower.
Alex Olley (01:35.80)
That's huge, man. Well, it sounds like your body's literally built for it. So let's go into it. I ask the same question to everyone. Everyone's got a big challenge they're trying to solve. And we call this the poison, right? And what we're trying to give listeners is an antidote. What's the big challenge you're on a mission to solve?
Mac Reddin (01:56.54)
The entire way companies sell basically, I guess the cold outbound driven way that people sell is the best way to put it. There's a lot more nuance to it, but that's the high-level version.
Alex Olley (02:02.18)
Okay. So why do you think it's such a big challenge or a problem?
Mac Reddin (02:18.15)
It doesn't work. I mean, as someone who has been in the buying seat for quite a few years at this point, the disconnect between the way buyers like to buy and want to buy and the way selling systems are set up. I think it's always been at odds. But you know, the last 15 years have been the easy times so…You can kind of brute force your way through things. And it's become very apparent in the last two or three years that the easy times are over and we're back to fundamentals and you can't brute force your way through things and that divide between the way buyers buy and the way sellers sell has never been more apparent.
I saw an article recently, I can't remember the exact number, so don't quote me on this, but it was something like buyers get 10 times the amount of outbound touchpoints as they did five years ago. And that's expected to double again in the next year or two. And AI and automation are only going to make that worse. So it's just, everything is noisy and annoying. And I can't think of a time that I have bought a thing off of a cold outreach in the last two years at all.
Alex Olley (03:25.09)
Okay. We are literally trying to solve not the exact same problem, but at Reachdesk, we saw the same. It's busy. It's so much digital noise. We're inundated by it. How are you thinking about solving this then?
Mac Reddin (03:39.18)
Yeah, so it's, I guess to give you a little bit of background. So Commsor started four years ago, but we sort of pivoted last year. We started as community-led growth. So originally we were hyper-focused on this idea that a company should build and foster communities as part of their go-to-market initiatives and that community can tie into that, build relationships. It can be a top-of-funnel, a middle-of-funnel, a bottom-of-funnel, or a post-sale benefit, it touches the whole spectrum. I've got a background in building community. So that's where that sort of naturally came from.
And I'll spare the very long story on why we pivoted and the nuance. But what we call it now is go-to-network. And in some ways, I think labels like that are really important, but in other ways, what you call it doesn't really matter. And especially in B2B, we're all obsessed with X-led this or new terms or new thought leadership things.
So call it people-first marketing, call it nearbound, call it go-to-network. They're all sort of rooted in similar thinking. There's differences, but, from our perspective, direct go to market doesn't work anymore, right? And I mean, there are times and places it works. I know the LinkedIn influencer who's gonna read this and be like, cold calls work for me. And they're gonna yell at me in the comments, yes, congrats, it works for you. But if you look at the industry as a whole, it doesn't work the way it used to. So companies have to build in our thesis, an inner network of champions, partners, creators, influencers, fans, advisors, ambassadors, investors, et cetera, that they can get to market through. You need this sort of network of people that can basically be your Sherpas into the market versus the direct go to a door, knock on it, and hope someone buys.
Alex Olley (05:16.99)
Okay, nice. Now I'm going to ask you about the pivot because I personally find that interesting. So where was Commsor, you know, two years ago, and what really triggered that pivot to happen?
Mac Reddin (05:28.30)
Yeah, so we are kind of the poster child for the 2020-2021 psychotic fundraising, where we fought tooth and nail to raise a pre-seed round, and then literally a seed round, an A round, another A round, and a B round got shoved down our throats for lack of a more elegant way of putting it. And it's an interesting thing to say, but raising that much money did almost kill us. A lot of founders right now are wishing they could raise a little bridge round.
But raising too much can actually be too much too. So the expectations on us were extremely high. And then a year and a half ago, the market corrected, changed, everything, you know, got a little less easy and whatnot. And our customer base became the first group that was laid off. Community managers were laid off left, right, and center. The big wake up moment for me was, we had a customer paying us a not insignificant amount of money and I woke up one day, all 12 of their community team had been laid off.
And we're calling the CMO, hey who owns this now? And they're like, call me in six months. I was like, well, our contract renews in four. They're like, yeah, well, call me in six months. All right, that's not a great sign. So we really had this introspection moment of, okay, obviously, you know, the hype around community is not quite what it was when we started. Times were a little tough. Do we just hunker down and survive through it, which we had the funds to do, or is there a deeper problem here? So we spent quite a few months doing this deeper introspection of is there something bigger or better we could do? So it wasn't really at the moment, at the time, a pivot for survival, as much as it was, there was an opportunity to slow down and look inward. And in that process of looking inward, we realized there was a better way to go after the same problem space we had started.
Alex Olley (07:17.08)
Nice. So very similar bucket, raised a lot of money back in 2021. I feel the pressure still, but you have to figure out a way through it. I see what you're talking about, a go-to network, similar, other acronyms or ways of describing it happen. But for those listening and watching, can you break it down in terms of the fundamentals and how people can actually employ this as a strategy for their own companies?
Mac Reddin (07:45.87)
Yeah, it's, I mean, I could fill the rest of this conversation with just that, if you let me, but I think it has to start with a mindset shift. You know, as someone who's trying to sell you a tool on it, it doesn't start with tooling. It starts with a mindset shift. And I think the big mindset shift is, I heard this the other week, the idea of commission breadth. A buyer can sense when a seller is just there to close a deal. And somewhere along the lines, I think because things were so easy, it feels like a large part of the tech sales world lost sight of the fact that as a salesperson, your job is to help a buyer save money, make money, save time, have a better life. And that's how you close a deal. Your job is not to close a deal, as much as that is actually what your goal is on paper. You don't get there by focusing on that. And so there's this mindset shift that's needed around building a relationship with people and actually coming at it with this authentic approach versus just this sell it at all cost mentality, which is what we were all doing for 10 years, up until two years ago.
A lot of sales teams, I think struggle with that point because a lot of sellers right now and a lot of sales leaders, they've never been sellers or sales leaders in a time where things weren't easy, right? They started 10 to 15 years ago. They came up when, you know money was cheap, money was free. Selling was easy. People were buying tools they weren't even using. And now you have to really focus on actually selling and not just picking up the phone or sending an email and just plugging some numbers in the hard part about go to network.
It doesn't really fit into the predictable revenue model, right? It's not a system where it's like, Oh, I can do X amount of activities, which leads to X amount of meetings, which leads to X amount of book meetings. Therefore I just, you know, I need to do X amount to get to Y amount. Easy done. It is unpredictable. It's very very human. And when I say you have to go at it with this intent of building relationships, that doesn't mean go make friends with your prospects, but it means be a real person, build an authentic relationship.
Only 5% of B2B buyers are in market at any given time. So yeah, if someone's in market right now, if someone's in the 5%, yeah, sell to them right now, right? If you send me an inbound request saying you want to buy our product right now. Yeah, I'm going to try to sell you the product right now. But if you're in that 95%, it's about building those connections through community, through content, through events, through personal branding, through social selling. It's about putting the person first instead of the brand first. It's about inverting the way companies have been building. So it starts with that.
Alex Olley (10:17.36)
Oh, mate, I love that so much. And I literally used that stat, that 5% stat yesterday in a team meeting. I was like, let's not try and ball the ocean. Let's just go after this very specific type of customer. But what I've learned is a lot of it's about signals. It's about capturing those signals at the right time.
So if anyone watching or listening is on LinkedIn, they will have seen what you guys have been doing over the past couple of weeks, and this blew my mind. And I do want to go into this. I remember going to LinkedIn and all of a sudden half of my network seemed to have dinosaurs next to their names. And I was thinking, what is going on here? Is this some publicity stunt? It kind of turned out it was. And when I looked into it, it was something that you guys said had orchestrated. So can you tell me a bit more about what that was all about? I mean, I obviously know, but I don't want to reveal the secret. How did you orchestrate it? That can't have been easy to pull off.
Mac Reddin (11:19.08)
I think, depending on your perspective, it was probably both easier than you think and harder than you think. So in the moment, it was easier than you think. But it took six months of work for that moment to be possible. I think that's the thing that a lot of people were like, oh my God, they must have spent a fortune paying these people to promote them. We didn't spend a cent. That's the most important. We didn't spend any money on that day. Not a single cent.
Alex Olley (11:41.53)
You didn't spend a cent? No way.
Mac Reddin (11:48.49)
Besides our team's time and effort, which obviously costs money, but that's all different, right? People have done this before. People have paid influencers to do posts and do LinkedIn takeovers, but paying influencers is a moment in time. It's like they pay the post a week later, the post is gone. Nobody remembers. Nobody cares. So it's the result of the fact that our team has been focused on building relationships and connections and actually getting to know our target buyers. So even six months ago, when we weren't ready to be selling our project, we were going out there and connecting and learning and researching and helping people. And we were helping people get jobs and connecting dots and just, we were just contributing to the sales community on LinkedIn, essentially.
So when it came time for us to launch, our whole thing was that we are the house of authentic connections. That's sort of our, our brand tagline, that's kind of the result of a go to network strategy is you create a house of authentic connections. So we built all these relationships and we thought, well, why don't we just ask these people if they want to be a part of it. And that's the other thing is people don't realize people like being a part of things. And if you actually have built an authentic relationship with people, all you have to do is ask.
And my favorite part about this is there were some really big names in our network that I actually didn't ask because I thought, oh, you know, this person's famous, they charge money for posts. They're never gonna say yes. And actually they DM me the day of and were like, why didn't you ask me? I would have loved to be part of this. And I was like, oh, I kind of assumed you charged $10,000 to do something like this. I assumed you wouldn't do it for free. So there's no harm in asking if you actually have given people a reason to care and be a part of something. I think that's the thing we've done is our brand, it has in a way transcended the product. People talk about Commsor and our herd and the dino, like they're part of a club or a community.
Some of them aren't even our customers. We had people who are not customers, who were hopping on calls with people on our launch day. Someone would ask a question in a LinkedIn comment and someone would chime in and say, oh, hop on a call and explain what Commsor does. They didn't work for us. They weren't a customer of ours. They weren't even paid or incentivized to do it. So it's one of those things that it's really hard to track the amount of work that went into making that day possible. But the day of and the week leading up to it was basically just asking people if they wanted to help. It wasn't much more complicated. I mean, it was, there was a lot more work to it, but it really boiled down to that.
Alex Olley (14:14.41)
That's amazing. And you said at the beginning of this episode, the thing that's been keeping you busy is just being back-to-back demos. That is a result of that day. And so look for those tha I think probably need to clarify. Here's what I saw. I saw everyone talking about Commsor. So I saw dinosaurs, I saw hashtag join the herd or something on those lines. I think I saw someone in a video with a giant inflatable dinosaur outfit as well, right?
Mac Reddin (14:20.49)
Yeah.
Alex Olley (14:42.92)
And so there was all this noise about dinosaurs which led everyone back to Commsor. And then it was a product launch that essentially went viral and it didn't cost you any money. And that is what has built your pipeline effect.
Mac Reddin (14:53.70)
Yeah, and then it's the ongoing results of it. And that's my favorite analogy of direct go to market versus go to network. Direct go-to-market stops working if you stop shoveling money into it. And if you've built an honest thing, it doesn't work, right? If you've built a system where you can put $1 in and get $2 out, by all means, keep putting $1 in to get $2 out. But if we're really honest with ourselves, most go-to-market systems are more like put $1 in get 75 cents out.
If you stop paying your SDRs to make cold calls and send emails, what happens next quarter? You book no meetings. If you stop paying for LinkedIn ads, what happens next quarter? You get no clicks to your site, no meetings. But if you focus on building an authentic community and content and relationships, it pays off and it compounds over time. And traditional go to market is basically based on a binary system. Right, closed won or closed loss. Either I'm with Alex, Alex is gonna buy, great, or not. But if you build a network…maybe you will never buy from me. Maybe the timing will never be right, the budget won't ever be there, but maybe at your next job, you'll buy from us because you like us and you've got the brand affinity and you've gotten to know us.
Or maybe you'll refer someone to us. I can't tell you how many of our leads are referrals from people that are either fans of ours, but you know, they're not the right company right now to buy from us, or they don't have the budget right now, or they're just not the right person to buy, but they like what we're doing. They stand behind what we're doing. They want to be a part of it. So they still send other people to us. So there's this multimodal outcomes that are possible when you build this compounding network versus just a system where you're shoveling money in, and if you stop shoveling money in, it just stops. It just ceases to exist.
Alex Olley (16:40.23)
Nice. Yeah. I mean, it's so spot on. Going back to the launch though, I can't imagine it was all plane sailing. There must've been some struggles along the way. Can you reveal much of the struggle?
Mac Reddin (16:49.64)
I mean, a lot of it was probably just our team overthinking and stressing out leading up to the day. To give you an idea, we'd been planning to launch for a while, and we just kind of decided a week and a half before launch day, we said, screw it. We're launching next Thursday. It's like, we just gotta rip the band off. We just gotta do it, right? You know what it is, your product's never, you know as a founder, your product's never good enough. It's never what you think. At a certain point, you just gotta do it.
We had a lot of feedback on that day saying you know, our product messaging still isn't great. Some people still didn't know what we did. We're never going to learn those things unless we put it out there. So that was really the only downside of the week and half leading up to it, was chaotic. The team trying to coordinate it and get the videos ready and overthinking it, panicking about do we have everything, is it going to go well? And I was doing a lot of tempering the team's expectations and you know, launches are really just moments in time. Launches are not getting to the top of the mountain, launches are getting to base camp, and now you have the right to start climbing the mountain. I think a lot of people think launches are these magic silver bullets, like we've launched, why is nobody buying from us? And it's, you know, it takes time. It's just a starting line.
And so I think because we temper our expectations so much internally, we were really blown away. We had our little war room the day of with a bunch of our team on Zoom, all sitting there for hours being like, oh, another post came in, make sure we respond to it. There was a lot of triage just to make sure we were engaging on social. And a lot of people were responding about how amazed they were, how responsive our team was that day and how quick we were on top of things. Because it was hard. There was four of us sitting in a Zoom basically all day just dealing with what was going on LinkedIn as a result of what we'd started.
Alex Olley (18:30.34)
Very cool. I'm sure it was a lot of fun, but also probably increased the heart rate a little bit. Nice. Well, congrats on that, man. I think you've blown a lot of people's minds. You certainly blew mine when witnessing it.
Mac Reddin (18:43.20)
Just wait until you see what we're doing next. Oh yeah, we're not done. We're just getting started.
Alex Olley (18:51.12)
I'll happily be part of the next one if you want me to join the herd.
So look, you're, you're the CEO of a startup. Certainly, everyone in my network is talking about what the journey has been like to get here.
Mac Reddin (19:11.08)
Very, very long. It's the classic overnight success of a decade in the making as they say. But like I said, when we were four years old as a company, we've already had one moment where everyone thought we were a hot startup because we raised so much money. So we got all the traditional press and all that. And then it was like, oops, maybe we raised a little too much and it was a little preemptive and times are good. And then times were corrected. So we had to go back to being, not the hot startup. And now it's like, Oh, we're back.
It definitely feels a lot better being the hot startup because people and our target buyers are talking about us versus the traditional like we raised money, so the press is talking about us. Two and a half years ago, it was like, Oh, we had the news article and it was like, Ooh, here's a photo of Mac because they raised so much money and Ooh, Mac's on Forbes 30 under 30. And in the moment you're like, yeah, I guess this is cool. It doesn't mean anything, that sort of stuff. It seems cool in the moment, but it doesn't actually matter.
So it's been a long journey. So I've been a founder for almost 13 years now, pretty much never had a normal job besides, you know, working at a clothing store when I was younger. And I've been a bootstrapper. This is my first time being VC-backed. One thing I'm constantly amazed by is how often things I've done at past companies, even if they're completely irrelevant to what I'm building now, how often a little learning or a little moment comes back. So it really feels like an overnight success, a decade in the making for me. There are so many things that have gone into making what I'm doing right now possible.
It's not a straight line. It's, do you know the book, The Messy Middle by Scott Belsky? Like just that image on the front where it's a line and it's like, back, front, up, down. And then a line on the other side. That is the best way to describe it.
Alex Olley (21:00.03)
That is, it feels like every day for me still. And you know, we've been at this for, this is our sixth year at Reachdesk. So still fairly young, but it feels like that all the time. I don't know anyone that's just kind of gone straight line, straight to the top.
Mac Reddin (21:08.41)
Yeah, and you have days it might look like that from the outside. It's always messier on the inside, right? It's always crazier. I feel like I have days where I wake up and I start the day, I'm like, I know exactly what I'm doing. I'm on top of the world. Everything's going great. By lunchtime, it's like, oh my God, this is terrible. I have no idea what I'm doing. And then by dinner time, it's like, everything's great again. And that might happen seven times in one day.
Alex Olley (21:34.87)
You are describing every day of my week still, but I love it, I love the thrill, but it's not easy. It's not easy though. I think that we have to acknowledge that. What's the hardest part you've been through?
Mac Reddin (21:54.44)
I mean, so many things. I think moving to Denmark in the middle of also starting to reinvent our business, I kind of underestimated how much an international move would take a toll on me mentally, and physically the amount of work to do and deal with it. And it was also trying to get a company through growth pains. That was a very long summer. The first summer I was here, I didn't really feel like I had moved. It was this weird limbo state. Yeah, adding personal stress on top of founder stress is always a recipe for chaos in a lot of ways.
Like if we'd had this interview nine months ago, 12 months ago, when we were at the starting line of reinventing the business, you know when you have those unknowns where it's like, you've built this thing, you've gotten the praise, you've raised the money, you've been told you're doing a great thing and you're deciding to throw away what you've spent three years of your life working on and essentially restart, but you don't know exactly what you're restarting with yet. That unknown makes the work a lot harder. Like when you wake up every day and you don't know exactly what you're going to get done that day. Now it's like, I'm actually probably working more and working harder than I was nine months ago, but I wake up every day and I have a pretty good idea of what I need to do that day and where I'm trying to go this week. And it makes the work a lot easier. It feels a lot more purposeful.
Alex Olley (23:16.61)
Interesting. And so look, I think some people, most people listening to this will probably be salespeople and marketing people, but some of them will be founders. On the journey that you've been on, are there any big lessons that you've learned or things that you would have done differently that you wish you could pass back to yourself? What's the number one thing? What's the thing that you go, I wish I'd just done this one thing differently. And this journey would have been more enjoyable, let's say.
Mac Reddin (23:31.41)
So many things. There's so many things I could say, but the one thing that I think is really important. And I have this conversation with, you know, new or soon-to-be founders all the time. There's nothing wrong with VCs. I love our VCs. We've been very lucky to have great ones. I think the greatest con that the VC industry has pulled on founders for the last 20 years is convincing us collectively that if you don't raise VC money, you're not a real founder. And I don't know, no one ever says that directly, but most of my life I've been a bootstrapper and then got sucked into this VC world. And I fell prey to this whole idea of like, we have to raise, we have to raise. It's the only way to do it. So very often when founders come to me asking for fundraising advice, I always say, take a week and just really be introspective on is raising money the right thing for your business. Because there are a lot of businesses and our original business, if we had bootstrapped it, I mean, who knows if it would have been possible.
But it actually would have been a great business. A couple of million dollars of ARR, cranking along, doing your thing, but also when you have this pressure of like we've raised 60 million dollars, a whole bunch of types of businesses stop being possible and so many companies raise money that shouldn't. And there's so much opportunity to build a great business that makes a million dollars, five million dollars, 10 million dollars a year that isn't VC backed. They might not be sexy. You might not get the news articles written about you, but really be introspective. Is that why you want to be a founder? Do you want to be a founder because you want to get on the billion-dollar bus train? Because most founders, I don't think that's what they actually want, but they've been subconsciously convinced that that's the only way to do it.
Alex Olley (25:18.29)
Oh, that's such good advice. I think we've been on a similar journey because I was sitting down with a CEO of a company recently, they're half a mil ARR with just two people in their first year of trading. It's just two of them. They've got a path to profitability. And I was like, don't buy into there. You don’t have to be a unicorn. Perhaps think about getting to 10 million and owning the entire business and selling it then. That's a much more exciting journey.
And he was like, I don't get it, why? And I was like, how long you got? There is a different world out there. And I think you're totally spot on.
Mac Reddin (25:53.72)
And neither one is right or wrong. It's just like there are some businesses that are not possible without VC money. And sometimes that is the right path, but I just don't think founders take that moment of pause and are like really honest themselves about why are you a founder? Is it because of that or is it just, you just wanna do your own thing? I've realized, I'm a founder because I like building things.
This time around, I just feel like I'm building a thing that happened to have gotten a lot bigger than anything else I've ever built. But I know that if, if Commsor gets sold or shuts down or anything, a year from now, two years from now, 10 years from now, the next thing I'm gonna do is build something else. It might not be VC-backed, it probably won't be. I'm gonna be a builder till the day I die. That's the kind of founder I am. And it took me a long time to have that self-realization that I wish I'd had three years ago.
Alex Olley (26:43.38)
Very interesting. Appreciate you sharing that man. Well, so look, we're actually coming to the end. Let's go through the quickfire round. I asked the same three questions to everyone. I'm gonna start with the first one. If you could have a drink with anyone in the world, whether they're dead or alive, who would it be and why?
Mac Reddin (27:01.09)
Dead or Alive, is like such a random deep cut. I don't know why this is the first one that came to my mind. I'm going with Theodore Roosevelt. I don't know, he always seemed like a cool person. I loved the saying, speak softly and carry a big stick. Always liked that mentality, I think. Be able to back your words up, but don't necessarily be the loudest person in the room is always how I took that. He just seems like a fascinating character, right? Invented the American national park system. Just like...
I don't know, seems like a cool dude to hang out with. I did a whole research project on him when I was in school and had to give a presentation to pertain to be him. So there's a childhood nostalgia element to it as well, in a way.
Alex Olley (27:43.05)
Oh, great. Wow. Very cool. I haven't heard that one before. All right, next one. Real quick then. So what's the dumbest thing you think go-to-market professionals are making right now? And what do you think they should do differently?
Mac Reddin (27:58.00)
I think a lot of people are over-indexing on AI. And I think there's a place for it. I think AI for research is great, but I don't know about you, but if I found out that a seller was using AI to talk to me, I wouldn't wanna talk to that seller. I think it's like, I've used the analogy that I think go to market teams right now. Have you seen the movie, Thelma and Louise? It's like marketing and sales. They're sitting in a car, they know that they are heading towards a cliff, but they're still debating how to make the car go faster instead of trying to turn the car. And it's like they don't even realize it, they're devouring themselves. They're increasing the volume, they're increasing the noise, they're creating the very system that is causing the system not to work.
Alex Olley (28:49.86)
I love it. I love the analogy as well. I think you're spot on. Okay.
Mac Reddin (28:53.88)
As much as that'll piss them off, but it's true.
Alex Olley (28:57.49)
It's fine. I think having a point of view is what's important and stand by it. Final question then, which company are you watching right now? And that you think might be a future game changer and you cannot say your own company.
Mac Reddin (29:09.00)
Yeah, I wouldn't. I, there's a lot. I had one, I knew this, I had one in my thoughts like five minutes ago. And of course, I'm like, what was the company I was thinking of five minutes ago?
Okay, this is not a game changer, but I think given the advice I talked about with founders, I think it's, it kind of ties that loop nicely, HappySelling.io that Neil is building. He is a perfect example how you can build a great company in a market that's relatively crowded, right? Sales rooms and that, like there's a lot of entrance in that space in the last few years.
He's doing it himself. He built it himself. He's built a good brand himself. He's selling it in a very go-to network-style way, bringing out brand ambassadors, social selling, building a personal brand. He's just hired his first employee and he's fully bootstrapped. And is it going to be a billion-dollar company? I don't know for his sake, if that's what he wants, I hope so. I just think the way he's going about building is very inspirational. And, if I were a founder looking to start a company right now, he's the kind of person I would look to for inspiration.
Alex Olley (30:19.23)
Very cool, I love that example, man. Sounds like bootstrapping is on your mind.
Mac Reddin (30:23.11)
I think, I don't know, I just think there's a time, but like I said, I come from that world. I heard this the last, I don't know, the other day last week for the first time, venture strapping, the idea of raising a small round from strategic rather than traditional VCs with the intention of never raising a round again. You get a little round to get yourself off the ground, but then the goal is to use that to get to profitability and then scale from there. And you structure it with those early investors on a profit share model. So even if there's no exit, there's still an outcome.
I think that sort of hybrid model, there's a lot of opportunity for that in the near future.
Alex Olley (30:58.11)
Very cool. I've learned something totally new with venture strapping today. So appreciate you sharing that man. So, um, Mac, I actually, this isn't intentionally to blow inside you, but I do ask one final question, before you go and in one sentence, if you can, just give some advice to other go-to-market professionals, what if you're advising people on how to break through the noise right now, what would you be telling people to do?
Mac Reddin (31:24.50)
Don't be blinded by the data. Too many strategies right now are so pure data-focused or people are afraid to do things because they can't be perfectly measured. A lot of the best marketing plays right now can't be perfectly measured and that's why they work well.
Alex Olley (31:41.24)
Oh, love it. Refreshing. Well, look, Mac, thank you so, so much for joining me. I particularly had such short notice after the big launch. I know you're incredibly busy. And for people who want to follow you or get in touch with you, how can they do that?
Mac Reddin (31:54.89)
LinkedIn's always a good one. I think I'm the only Mac Redden on LinkedIn. So it should be a pretty easy search. Or if there's more than one, look for the one with a dinosaur in the name. That's usually a good way to do it. I'll say I love talking to people. If you want to have, you know, go to network or things like that. I'm always happy to help. If you're a aspiring founder looking for advice, I love having conversations with people who are just about to take that leap into founderland because I wish I had more people to have that conversation with before I did this crazy thing four years ago. So yeah always open to conversations if folks want to reach out.
Alex Olley (32:35.05)
Love it. Mate, thank you so much for joining us. This has been another episode of The Antidote. We'll catch you all soon.
Mac Reddin (32:41.19)
Appreciate you for having me.
