Dave Hurt of Verb Data: Things You Need To Know To Create a Successful App or SaaS

Work with early customers to ensure you’re solving their problems well before over-expanding. You’re never finished, your software will always be evolving and your first version isn’t your last.

As part of my series about the “5 Things You Need To Know To Create a Successful App or SaaS”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Dave Hurt CEO and Co-Founder Of Verb Data.

CEO Dave is on a mission to build a lasting company through a great team and strong customer relationships. Previously, he was an early employee at ONOSYS and co-founded Prototype1, a prototyping and development agency acquired by a leading customer.

Thank you so much for joining us! Our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

I first caught the startup bug when I joined ONOSYS as a customer success manager. The founders did an amazing job creating a culture that made it exciting to come to work and made everyone feel like they were making an impact. I grew my skillset from customer success to product management and fell in love with building teams and products.

ONOSYS is also where I met my business partner, Oleg. Since we met 10 years ago, Oleg and I have started a couple of companies and helped other SaaS businesses scale.

What was the “Aha Moment” that led you to think of the idea for your current company? Can you share that story with us?

When we started thinking about creating a new product and company we first spent a few months just interviewing our peers in the SaaS space. We spoke with over a hundred people from SaaS executives, engineers and product people and the conversation was centered around how they were approaching customer analytics.

Our Aha moment was more of a cumulative effect built with each interview. Everyone struggled to support their customer analytics requests but knew that they were valuable. When you start hearing the same problem across more than a hundred people and companies, the problem feels pretty obvious.

Can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey? Did you ever consider giving up? Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard?

Starting and running a few businesses together, Oleg and I have been through our fair share of difficult times. It may sound cliche for businesses started in 2020 but the beginning of the pandemic was a scary time to be founding a company. Looking back on it, it was as good of a time as ever but no one knew that then.

We had just started investment conversations for our pre-seed round and investors had some initial hesitation that delayed a lot of conversations but we knew that Verb would need funding to get off the ground.

We decided to keep pushing things forward as far as we could without outside investment which meant moving slower than we had hoped resulting in a few missed opportunities with beta customers and spending more of our personal funds.

Our drive comes from being passionate about the work we’re doing. We chose a problem and industry that we’re really interested in and when things are tough it’s still fun to show up to work and help our customers solve these problems.

So, how are things going today? How did your grit and resilience lead to your eventual success?

Starting a company is hard, every day. It’s like pushing a boulder uphill. Gravity is working against you and early on, progress only happens by pushing the rock one step at a time. As you build a team, the rock gets easier to collectively push up the hill and eventually we hope to reach the summit and the rock will start rolling down the otherside.

Believing that momentum is built one step at a time always gets me going — whether it’s crossing a task off my list or hiring a new employee.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘take aways’ you learned from that?

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

We take a pretty holistic approach to our customers’ problems. This means that we aren’t just solving one piece of the puzzle but really trying to help alleviate a major piece, if not the entire puzzle of customer analytics. In order to do this and provide support to our customers our engineering team does most of the customer conversations. This is an awesome way to provide support to our customers, who are mostly engineers, but it also informs our product development plans because the team on the front lines of support has a direct impact on the product itself.

By removing the layers between customers and builders we believe that our product and everyone that uses it will be better off.

Which tips would you recommend to your colleagues in your industry to help them to thrive and not “burn out”?

I think everyone needs to find their own solution for this and it will be unique to themselves. For me, the key to avoiding burnout is prioritization and presence. When you’re doing work, stay focused on work when you’re giving yourself time to relax, focus on that. When you’re present in what you’re doing it really helps the nagging stress that causes burnout. I don’t believe in multi-tasking.

Another thing I do is schedule vacations months in advance. When I’m in the moment I have a really hard time pulling away but if I put designated time on the calendar far enough in advance it makes it a little easier to step away when the time comes.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?

I totally agree that we don’t do anything alone. We see the many accolades of hero founders like Elon Musk or Steve Jobs but I think that’s such a disservice to everyone who works at their respective companies.

I’ve been working with my business partner, Oleg, for over 10 years. His background is system engineering and he’s a great technical partner to have because he’s very good at explaining technical concepts. I’ve become a much more technical product person by osmosis over our partnership. Lastly, we’ve built up a trust between each other that we know that we have each other’s best interest at heart. That took time to build but it’s great to have a partnership in which there is no drama or mistrust.

Ok thank you for all that. Now let’s shift to the main focus of this interview. Approximately how many users or subscribers does your app or software currently have? Can you share with our readers three of the main steps you’ve taken to build such a large community?

We were in private beta until May this year and have been building our community since. Our approach to community has been led by what our customers want and what will make them more successful. We’ve been working closely with as many customers as we can to not only help them gain value from our platform but also to learn what else we can do to make Verb even more useful. We’ve discussed with our customers what type of support & community would help them most and no one has asked for a traditional forum style or slack group. What they are looking for is a two way relationship with our team so they understand where the Verb product is going and how they can use it to grow their own platforms.

I think many early stage startups expect that they can easily build communities that will be self-sustaining and even provide new business opportunities but this is much more nuanced than it looks. When thinking about community building it’s imperative to understand what your members will get out of it not how you can use your customers to do the work for you. I’ve seen so many communities that turn to ghost towns because the value prop was so 1 sided.

What is your monetization model? How do you monetize your community of users? Have you considered other monetization options? Why did you not use those?

Value comes before monetization. If you can create a valuable enough community then it’s possible to monetize it but monetizing a community before there is any value will never work. We’re focused on value creation at this stage of our business and customer community.

Verb’s product value is in the analytics infrastructure management and the value grows as the amount of data and usage grows. With that in mind,our pricing is consumption based, meaning that customers pay based on the amount of data that they use. We chose to avoid charging based on users because it was cost prohibitive for our customers and didn’t seem fair.

I feel we can link this back to the previous question and also speculate on how a community can be used (monetized) to benefit the company.

Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things one should know in order to create a very successful app or a SaaS? Please share a story or an example for each.

Know your market or build something that you would use. We’ve gone through a lot of ideas over the years and the ones that we struggled with the most were the ones that were just too far outside of our experience. Even if you commit to doing the research and learning the problem, someone who has lived with that problem will have better instincts. For example, Oleg and I started working on a legal AI product that was supposed to help automate the initial steps of the due diligence process during M&A transactions. Our original idea was to build a tool to help translate contracts or other legal documents into layman’s terms but we ended up down the M&A path based on the interview with lawyers. We prototyped the concept and it was really, really rough. To refine the product we would have needed to go to law school or asked our lawyer friends for months of pro-bono help. Ultimately, we felt like it was too far outside of our wheelhouse because we didn’t have the depth of knowledge in the legal space.

So these are the most important things you need to think about when building a successful SaaS

1. Know your market and the problem you are solving like the back of your hand.
2. Work with early customers to ensure you’re solving their problems well before over-expanding. You’re never finished, your software will always be evolving and your first version isn’t your last.
3. Your first version (MVP) should be a little embarrassing. If you aren’t embarrassed, that means you took too long to release it.
4. Distribution is just as important as your product. When testing your product ideas you will also need to test out your sales and marketing plans. When we were prototyping the Verb product we also tested out digital ads and created landing pages to see what messaging and strategies worked.

You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

We should all move from a consumption based lives to a more contribution focused one. We spend so much of our time consuming things whether it’s buying stuff, scrolling on social media, expecting others to do things for us, or building stuff to sell and others to consume. If we focused more on contributing (not selling) I think we’d be happier and so would the planet. It’s a simple concept but hard to practice — give before you take.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

Check us out at www.verbdata.com and on social @verbdata

This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!