[00:00:27] Jay: Hi everyone. Welcome to The First Customer Podcast. My name is Jay Aigner today. I am lucky enough to be joined by Peter Bonney. He is the founder and CEO of Fastbreak RFP Peter. Hello. How are you, buddy?

[00:00:41] Peter: Doing great, Jay. How are you?

[00:00:42] Jay: I'm good.

Just saying how nice it is. It's I feel bad for my great grandchildren that they won't have a winter, but you know, I'm enjoying this nice

seventies day in the fall.

So,

[00:00:53] Peter: it's, yeah, it's beautiful here. I was outside, with, without a jacket earlier. It was amazing.

[00:00:57] Jay: That's great. I love it. All right. well, where did you grow up and did that have any impact on you being an entrepreneur later in life?

[00:01:03] Peter: You know, it's funny. I was just talking with somebody about this. so where I grew up, not so much, I grew up in Massachusetts. I grew up in a small town called Somerset, at the time, pretty blue collar place. main business in town was a, coal fired power plant. Now, I guess it's sort of a suburb of Boston.

but yeah, definitely. Had an impact on my future life as an entrepreneur. My parents both went to trade schools. Neither one of them went to a four year college. And my dad, especially it was very much, you know, what we today call a hustler. he worked in retail most of his career, but always had.

side businesses, he, like, I guess, you know, we now popularly call a side hustle for us growing up was, you know, just a weekend, like always I guess my dad was a picker, slash. Flipper, he, you know, he would kind of do the circuits of like local auctions and flea markets and find the stuff that he just kind of kept this mental, you know, map of, you know, values for and like buy it cheap and then, you know, sell it at his own flea market table a couple of weekends later for more and just, you know, always just generating extra cash that way.

So yeah,

[00:02:18] Jay: Love that.

[00:02:19] Peter: kind of always spirit.

[00:02:20] Jay: I love that a lot. have you, have you seen any of those characteristics kind of in yourself as you've gotten older?

[00:02:28] Peter: Yeah. Especially, the older I've gotten, the more I've come to appreciate I have in common with my dad. you know, like growing up,it wasn't so obvious to me. I'm much more took after my mother. and. You know, my dad was a great salesperson. I was never a good salesperson. my dad is the life of the party.

like he literally will never stop talking. Like if there's a silence, like the words will just come out of his mouth and I'm the complete opposite. Like I'm quiet. you know, you gotta ask me questions to get me talking. And I always thought like, oh, we're totally different, but. I spent a lot of time working with my dad growing up.

so he was in the shoe business. He ran shoe stores. I went to his shoe store a lot, you know, this was, you know, we didn't have daycare or babysitting available. Like sometimes if we need a child, if they needed childcare, like I just went to the store, you know? I was just in the back room. I would help him with stuff and a lot of the way he approached the job really rubbed off on me.

he was very good at it. He was a very good retail manager. He was a great salesperson and like he always had this. Insane customer focus. and he had these quotes up in his back room, like one of which I've never forgotten. and, I waited, looked up who it's attributed to. I think it was, might've been the founder of Studebaker.

It was, it said the customer is not an interruption to your job. The customer is your job. And, you know, I think especially for people in retail, like it can feel like, Oh God, these people are annoying, but like, that's why you're there. Right. and you know, it's the same. Yeah, it's. That kind of like, look, the customer's always right there, who's paying us there.

why we're in business nowadays, it's a swanky to call it customer obsession. I got it from my dad.

[00:04:09] Jay: I love it. so you started a couple of companies, I think. What was the first one you founded?

[00:04:14] Peter: Yeah. So, vendorful, procurement software solution. And I knew nothing about procurement going into that. I had some exposure to RFPs in my prior life and thought like, Oh, Hey, like buying stuff is a challenge. For big companies, my co founder and I said, Oh, we can make this better. and we did, but like, man, we learned a lot of hard stuff along the way that would have been useful to know before we started the company in procurement.

[00:04:37] Jay: what were some of those things?

[00:04:40] Peter: what were some of the things that we learned?

[00:04:41] Jay: Yeah. Like what were the big things that you wish you'd maybe sketched out first?

[00:04:45] Peter: Yeah, well, so I don't think we appreciated the degree to which. Procurement is undervalued by big companies. It's like,it's a cost center and we knew that going in. Okay, fine. It's a cost center, but our assumption was if you can save a dollar, like if your procurement team can save a dollar. That dollar falls straight to your bottom line, right?

That's pure profit. So that ought to be valued as much as, or more than a dollar of sales. Cause if you sell a dollar worth of stuff, you've got a margin on that actually getting a dollar of profit. So, you know, our thinking was like, Hey, anything that, that like falls straight down to the bottom line, companies will be willing to invest in like obvious ROI and so like, we went out with this strategy of, going to market by saying, let's do like an RFP, let's do a reverse auction, get hard dollar savings right on a first event, you run for free, and that money will, you know, that savings will then more than pay for a contract and you will have validated that this is going to save you money down the 

line.

Save enough. Then, you know, walk away. don't, you know, don't get into a contract. No big deal. The very first time we got somebody to take us up on that, they ran a reverse auction. They saved, I want to say 150, 000 off their existing contract for something. And like we were proposing them like a 20, 000 a year contract.

Hey, no brainer, right? Like, like bring it to the CFO, let's sign. And they're like, after the auction, they're like, Hey, that was great. Thank you so much. We saved a lot of money. unfortunately that money doesn't fall to my budget. so, you know, CFO still said, no,

[00:06:35] Jay: Right. Yep.

[00:06:37] Peter: are you kidding me? So yeah.

[00:06:40] Jay: I love that. all right. So tell me about Fastbrick. You did Vendorful. did you guys exit there or did that shut down? How did that work?

[00:06:47] Peter: Oh, yeah. So it's, it's, we sold it. you know, it became self sustaining, grew it to a point of being profitable, did not grow to the scale of business that, you know, we wanted it to be like, we thought we, we thought like, Hey, we're sitting on something like Coupa, you know, like that this could be a multi billion dollar business.

And it didn't grow to that. I'm proud of what it grew to, you know, grew to, you know, was seven figures and that's cool. but that was not going to be the thing that changed my life or my co founder's life. So, you know, we,we exited that and, actually the order of operations was slightly different along the way we, one of the, one of the lessons of selling to procurement was that not only were we helping them run RFPs, we had to sell through RFPs all 

[00:07:32] Jay: Right. 

[00:07:33] Peter: we were always facing competitive bids and they were super annoying. and especially because like they weren't using software, like we were selling software to make it better. They were using Excel sheets and these horrible things. Anyway, it was so frustrating, to solve our internal problem of having to respond to RFPs in order to grow the procurement business, we started developing a model to help us complete RFPs based on RFPs we'd done in the past.

And.

[00:07:59] Jay: Around kind of like spring of 2023, we're like, actually, this is pretty cool. this should be, you know, could maybe be its own product. And so we put it out to market under the Vendorful brand, started getting traction on it and we're like, actually, this is really cool. this is where we should focus.

[00:08:14] Peter: And so then that's when we kind of cleaved it off, and started selling the old business and said like, this is fine. but this is the old business is not, you know, is not our dream. Let's, you know, let's get what we can for it, get, find a nice home for it. you know, other people will continue to get value from it, but like we, we want to focus on, on, on the new thing.

And so, we separated that, we rebranded it as Fastbreak. cause you know, no longer have the vendor full name. And, yeah, no, that's,that's our new business. That's where we're focused,

[00:08:42] Jay: How many of the team did you bring over with you?

[00:08:44] Peter: five people. So it was like back to early stage startup mode. Like we're very early stages. you know, we have our kind of initial customers, but it's like, you know, we gave up like, you know, 90 percent of the revenue, we thought the old business. And so, you know, it's back to the days of experimentation and like, you know.

Me as founder being in every deal, you know, handling support tickets, which is actually, it's a lot of fun and it's, I've really kind of missed that work.

[00:09:13] Jay: What? What would you say product market fit wise you guys are doing differently this time than the last time?

[00:09:23] Peter: well, so look, the big thing is it's a totally different ballgame selling to revenue teams versus selling to, procurement teams. I mean, and I don't mean this as a dig against procurement. I have a ton of respect for people in procurement. They really face a lot of challenges, including like a misunderstanding of what they do.

But having said all that, it is a hell of a lot easier making a sale when the person who's buying Has a revenue story. It just is like businesses are just predisposed to prefer a dollar of sales over a dollar of savings. And, and so, like, in terms of like, you know, product market fit, like, I don't think we're there yet.

I think we're probably pretty far from it. that's a whole other separate discussion. Whether anyone's ever has product market fit. But like the, like certainly the problem solution fit, like the precursor, happened much faster. it was much more obvious, you know, you just, you talk to people in sales, anybody who's in B2B sales is responding to RFPs.

Like they've got the pain, they get the problem. They see their own inefficiency. They see the gains they can get from it. it's just a much smoother, easier conversation.

[00:10:38] Jay: How do you calculate total addressable market for the product?

[00:10:44] Peter: Yeah, that's, well, that's a really good question. right now I've actually, I'm in the process of niching down cause it's, the total, the real total addressable market is stupid big and is not actually that helpful, you know, cause it's like, what's the total addressable market of an RFP product.

Everybody in the world who responds to parties, right? Which is every B2B company over a certain size or selling to companies over a certain size. And that is not helpful for targeting. So we are, niching down, to the industries where we've seen the most initial traction. And the one that seems the most promising, is, it's health insurance, which is interesting.

They have like huge, pain points with RFPs. And so, you know, look, the way I'm thinking about it to get to your question is I'm not really thinking about what the total addressable market actually is for this product. I'm thinking about what is the total addressable market of our current go to market strategy?

Like, so we're going to keep us busy for the next 2 years, right? And then think about Tam expansion and then further Tam expansion. so, yeah, so, so, like, I'm actually. In a weird way, I'm actually trying to shrink the TAM at the 

[00:11:58] Jay: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah, for sure. Yeah. And I mean, I think. I think that's, that exact problem exists for most B2B agencies, right? It's like, well, of course it could be, everyone could use this service, but here's the real, here's the hungry. It should be like an HTM, right? It should be like

hungry, total addressable market.

Like what is the most on fire pain point and what's the size of them? Because that's the real number, right? That's the only one you really care about.

[00:12:28] Peter: Yeah, that's actually great. I love that. the hungry TAM that, that is, that's good.

[00:12:33] Jay: It sounds like a kid's book. we could teach kids, business by the Hungry Tam. I think that's a, I might have to go do that.

very cool. All right. So, you've been doing this new business for what? A year and a half now, almost two years. Is that about right? Yeah.

[00:12:45] Peter: Yeah. You're an F yeah.

[00:12:47] Jay: is there anything you would have done differently? At the start, like right when you guys spun it off, looking back two years or something, you said, I wish we would've done it slightly differently here. Right.

[00:12:58] Peter: And I

actually, look, as early as we were able to get some validation by, you know, talking to people in sales and talking to people who we thought were in our addressable market. I wish I had done so even earlier, and I wish I had been a little bit more expansive about who I talk to.

So let me, like, give some specific examples. So when we. We started out, with this product, like our initial hypothesis about who we were going to sell to is people like us, right? Like, relatively, you know, small to midsize software companies that were doing B2B and didn't have a lot of resources to respond to RFPs.

and that targeting. Suggests kind of a certain contract size, right? Like, they're not going to pay 100, 000 a year. The point a, you know, somewhere between, you know, 000, depending on the size of the, and so those were the kinds of people we talked to. Like, we talked to people like ourselves. And we had our own, you know, experience.

We're like, okay, this is, you know, all kind of validating. And that was all fine. But we, because we didn't expand, we weren't thinking expansively enough about what it could be and who the market could be. I didn't go out and talk to these companies that are doing like multi billion dollar RFPs in other industries, right?

I never talked to a health insurer. I never talked to somebody in defense, right? And had I done so earlier, we probably would have made some different product choices out of the gate, which we eventually got to and sort of eventually realized like, Oh, like, you know, the easier path to market here is not this kind of like small transactional sale in a weird way.

It's actually investing more time in doing a single deal. That's like, it's like, like the basic math is what we found is it takes us about twice as long to do a deal. That's like five to 10 times the size.and that is just a better go to market. Like the basic matches is obvious. And, and I could have learned that probably.

You know, six to nine months earlier, had we done more interviews of people?

[00:15:14] Jay: hear that a lot. And I think, as a businessman or myself, market research is like probably just one of the worst terms. I mean, it's just not the term itself, but just. The stigma around it, the actuality of it, it does suck to put together, like, and figure out how much is enough and how long do we do this and how wide do you go?

And then almost every single time, the answer is not enough, right? Like I hear that time and time again, and it's getting in front of your customers is, or potential customers and getting that feedback early. I don't think. Could be overstated. So I really liked that.

[00:15:48] Peter: and I'll say another thing, like, you know, people always talk about going out to your network. That's fine. Like that was really helpful to us to go out to our network, to talk to people. What I wish I'd done more of was going outside our network.

[00:15:58] Jay: Right. That's a good point. Yeah.

And so how would you suggest somebody kind of in your same shoes go past the network? Like, where would you go? Well, who would you talk to? Like at that point, you're like back into uncharted territory as a market researcher, you're like, I don't even know, don't put a survey together.

Do I like go to a conference? Do I join a group? Like, what do I do to get out of my network?

[00:16:23] Peter: yeah, well, so, all right, this is going to sound weird. the first step, one of the first steps I think now is actually a conversation with chat GPT. I had a, An interesting chat with chat GPT a few months ago. where like, I don't usually use it this way. I usually use it for like very tangible, like this document, like, you know, restructure it or whatever, like, or help me write a blog post.

But I said, you know what, everyone talks about brainstorming with it. It's great brainstorming tool. I'm going to try it. And so I formed on possible markets that we could expand into, and it was really interesting. Because it very surprisingly came up with stuff that like, I don't think is, you know, earth shattering, but just like it, it reminded me of like things that were related, like different industries, like, oh, well, Hey, like, if you're having success in software, because, you know, they have these characteristics, have you considered this niche of manufacturing because they all respond, have customers that look like that and have, you know, some more questionnaires.

And so, you know, had I been starting out at the time, had I done this like nine months earlier. 10 months earlier or whatever, I would have then taken that information and then gone straight to LinkedIn. So LinkedIn is the incredible tool for connecting you with anybody, right? Like I do this for sales all the time.

This is now our main go to market channels, reaching out to people through LinkedIn, but it works just as well, I'm sure for market research. And I would have, you know, used that to identify people in my, that, you know, I sort of discovered, as being in my target market through chat GPT, and just literally told them, Hey, we are, I'm an entrepreneur.

I'm thinking about starting this business. Would you be willing to talk to me for 15, 20 minutes about. Civic thing, because people want to talk about their problems. They really do. And so I think, you know, a combination of chat for brainstorming, LinkedIn for connecting with people. And I would be shocked if you didn't get like a, you know, somewhere between like a one in five and one in 

You know, acceptance rate for those meetings, 

[00:18:27] Jay: Yeah, that's a great idea. and I use it for brainstorming too. I think it's a underutilized, I mean it has all the information in the universe, right? So it's, you can like who better to bounce ideas off of. I love that a lot. All right. I have one final question. Non business related. This is just Peter as a guy. If you could do anything on earth and he knew you wouldn't fail. What would it be?

[00:18:50] Peter: I could do anything on earth and I knew what I wouldn't fail, what would it be? geez, that's a good one. I knew I wouldn't fail. I would go to the bottom of the ocean. Like, if I knew that I was not going to get crushed like that. I mean, the horrible accident.

[00:19:02] Jay: Yeah.

[00:19:04] Peter: I am fascinated by that. I would love to do that.

I am way too risk averse to ever actually get in a submersible and go that far into the ocean, but I would love to do that. 

[00:19:18] Jay: That's a great answer. I've actually never got that. We get space all the time, obviously, and like, you know, I would go to the Mars and all that, but we've never heard bottom of the ocean. I agree. That would be very cool. I think it's, I'm very, it's like the last uncharted territory on earth. it's very cool.

I love that.

[00:19:32] Peter: The majority of life on earth lives out of our sight. it's 

[00:19:36] Jay: I'm not sure I want to see some of it. Some of it's pretty terrifying, but, if I, if there was no risk of failure, I would definitely do that. All right. We'll be your great, where can people find you if they want to reach out about something they heard today and how can they find a Fastbreak RFP?

[00:19:49] Peter: Sure. fastbreakrfp. com is our website and, I'm very easy to find on LinkedIn, Peter Bonney. There's a couple of us in the world, but not that many. 

[00:19:56] Jay: All right. Well, we'll match you up. We'll link you up after this. All right, Pete. It was great having you on brother,

keep up the great work and we'll keep up with your journey and, wish you the best of luck. All right.

[00:20:04] Peter: Thanks a lot.

[00:20:04] Jay: Thanks Pete. See ya. 

​