He Lost $3M on a Failed Pivot — Here's What CloudTask Does Differently (Amir Reiter) - We Built It Because We Had To

<cite>Speaker 1:</cite>
<time>00:00</time>
Hello, and welcome to a new episode of We Built It Because We Had To. I'm Jonathan Buckley, founder and CEO of the Artesian Network, and we're a band of experts built and designed to help early stage tech companies, their founders, their CEOs get established and reach scale. More than 50% of our clients have ultimately made it to IPO or to an acquisition exit. Today, I'm joined for Founder Backstories from CEOs and Founders by Amir Reiter, the Founder and CEO of a company called CloudTask. Now I'll let Amir tell you about the company, but what interests me about this was that the company went through a series of pivots during its iterations and seems to have found very good traction now.
<cite>Speaker 1:</cite>
<time>00:52</time>
So with that, Amir, thanks for joining us here today.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>00:56</time>
Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
<cite>Speaker 1:</cite>
<time>00:59</time>
Yeah. So, I tell you what, start by giving us a little background on yourself. You know, how did you make it to become an entrepreneur in the first place?
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>01:12</time>
Yeah, I, was, I'm 43 now. So I've, I had my share of businesses and my shares of jobs. And, and, I was a young entrepreneur at, in my early twenties, had a water service company that I ended up selling. And then I worked in a surgical robotics and I worked for a company called NetSuite based in San Francisco. And the whole time I, I always had, a team in The Philippines, while I had that soft that's water company.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>01:38</time>
And I used NetSuite and I couldn't afford $250 an hour for somebody in San Francisco. So, I hired somebody, in The Philippines for $20 an hour for NetSuite skills, which was a lot, actually high payment for, that kind of job. And I always thought global, work was the future. And after leaving NetSuite, I decided to go all in on CloudTask, which was really became, you consider it a like a BPO for sales development reps, customer success reps and customer support. Right?
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>02:07</time>
And we worked with companies like RingCentral, Vonage, Apollo as one of the companies we helped them build their whole Latin American team. You know, Grammarly, Expensify, lots of SaaS companies, lots of non SaaS companies, doing companies that were, you know, 50 million ARR selling machinery. Right? And help them really build and manage SDRs, account executives, customer support, and customer success teams. And we, in 2020, went on a venture to become a marketplace that actually supported, agency owners like yourself, because I think one thing you said is that, you know, you specialize in series B and helping people get product market fit and just really helping, buyers and customers.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>02:49</time>
You know, that pivot didn't really work out too well for us. I think just the objects of having, candidates where and, services is a little bit too much. From two years ago, we just really went double down on, Latam talent and Caribbean talent. You know, we've helped over 10,500 people get hired over the last ten years. And we're really just collecting the data on, we're collecting the data on buyers and candidates so that we can make the right matches and really ultimately supporting long term hires that we reduce the risk of a hire.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>03:21</time>
Company just pays one flat fee, right? Whether that's 2,500 a month for an SDR, 3,500 or 4,500. Right? That's usually the sweet off of some of the top, talent in LatAm. You mentioned you're working with somebody in Mexico, so you know about how awesome the talent in LatAm is.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>03:37</time>
And that's where I'm based. I'm in Medellin, Colombia and I spent time in San Francisco, New York. So, I'm really collecting data on, you know, not only I would say what kind of jobs and experience candidates had, but like really like what their success stories are and like, oh, you're using Claude. What are you doing with Claude? Right?
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>03:56</time>
Are you are you are you integrating you with Facebook Ad Manager? Are you making memes? Right? So, just collecting the data that allows us to make, really solid matches and our average LTV, which for us an LTV lifetime value is how long somebody hire somebody for is twenty four months. And then they typically do a permanent placement after that and graduate them.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>04:18</time>
So think of us like, like, long term freelance hires where you you you know, you you have full time people, they're your employee. You have don't to deal with the liability. You don't have to worry about compliance. And you know, you, and, you can not have to sift through 10,000 applications and screen all these people because we've already done it
<cite>Speaker 1:</cite>
<time>04:40</time>
and we
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>04:40</time>
collect the data. Yeah.
<cite>Speaker 1:</cite>
<time>04:42</time>
So there, it sounds like there'd be a multiple set of things or buckets of value that your clients would see from you. I guess one is a superior matching algorithm and we'll get into that for a second. If you're, if you're getting these long term statistics, clear, clearly that product offering is working. It sounds like, it's allowing the try before you buy, you know, reducing risk, bringing on maybe an early stage company, bringing on, people first as contractors and then moving them to hires once the business is stable. Do I have that right?
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>05:26</time>
Well, the ironic thing is that we have people right now that have been working at companies for eight years, which has been much longer than W2s. So I think the contra, I think the old school, like I give you a W2 and you work for me until you're retired is just what am I hiring? Am I happy am I happy for the company am I working for? And am I getting results? Right?
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>05:58</time>
You've been a marketing leader. Right? So, you've probably been in a situation where you hire somebody who likes them, they like you, but they don't perform and you've let them go. Right? Or you have somebody where you hire them, and they're not and they're performing and they don't like you and you lose them.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>06:12</time>
Right? So, we're really telling people that it's not the compliance. It's the job match that makes the difference between long term and not long term. And ironically, and I'll be transparent with you, like I have 13 people on my team. They've been with me for eight years.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>06:24</time>
They're all contractors and they have equity in my company. I think the idea that you need to be active partner. So like, if you're telling me that you need to be a W-two to be a partner, I would say that that might've worked in 1945. The W-two is really meant to collect taxes for the government. So, I I would say the people that do the permanent hire, John, are Mhmm.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>06:45</time>
People that wanna they wanna make the person a VP or a director. Right? Mhmm. And that's usually the compelling events. Right?
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>06:52</time>
So, compelling event is it's more more of like, you know, this guy's been great as an account executive. I want to be VP of sales and I want to maybe give him shares for the company under a Delaware Corp. Right? So, I want a W-two. Right?
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>07:04</time>
It's, it all the companies you work with have W-two, some don't. Right? They can they can definitely circumvent them. Because one of the problems is that, you got companies that are are like deal and on top and they saw in compliance, they saw in fear. Right?
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>07:21</time>
But if you hire somebody in Latin America and you put them on an appointment of record, you're gonna get twenty one holidays that they have to take off and you're gonna 45% payroll tax. Yeah. So, you know, the big thing is that, when it comes to compliance, it really makes sense for like IPO publicly traded companies. Right? So like if you're gonna go public and you're gonna put a 100 people in office in Monterrey, Mexico, then you might want an EOR for compliance reasons.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>07:45</time>
Right? So it's really just how you're structuring your team as well. So they all they all have their place. Nothing replaces another, but, yeah, we've seen people under under, our agreements for eight years straight. You know, we've had a lot of bosses come and go.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>08:00</time>
But you have both. Right? So, really focus more on like, are they a good match? Do they know their job description? Are they performing?
<cite>Speaker 1:</cite>
<time>08:09</time>
Versus compliance. Right, right, right. So, for the audience, initially when I came across Amir, I saw his company more as a recruitment and placement firm, but I became interested in the underlying technology that would enable these long term matches. So I want to hear about that Amir. Tell us about you have an AI underpinning, that helps with this.
<cite>Speaker 1:</cite>
<time>08:38</time>
Tell us what it does and how you came to build it.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>08:41</time>
Well, it's obviously, it's all about data, right? And our, our, our database has a lot more specs than you can imagine. Right? And and what what a company thinks of as a job opening. Right?
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>08:55</time>
They tend to be like very generic. Right? And and they might be like five fields. Right? What we call a job opening in our world is is a CMO.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>09:04</time>
It's not a chief marketing officer. It stands for mechanical match objects. That's our lingo. Right? And the way that we use AI is by focusing like, I'm not gonna talk to you, John, and be like, like, ask ask ask you 45 questions.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>09:16</time>
Right? Mhmm.
<cite>Speaker 1:</cite>
<time>09:17</time>
So we
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>09:17</time>
have a series of questions that allows us to extract from the transcript with with AI, the answers to those 45 questions. So now that that now our mechanical match object becomes, a leverage for us, right, with some internal fields. Right? Because people say they wanna hire somebody with AI experience, but there's a big difference in somebody who's, programming, you know, consumer products and anti gravity versus using clawed code versus using Gemini. Right?
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>09:44</time>
So we're collecting the specifics from the CMO, the chemical match object. And then when we meet with candidates, we have something called the remote cure coach. Right? And that person is actually interviewing them, also using AI, transcript extraction. And we're asking questions where, you know, you find candidates that, you know, they're they're they're they say they want a job as like an administrative assistant.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>10:08</time>
Right? And then you interview them and you're like, tell me about like a good story. And you're like, well, when, when, COVID happened, I was working for Airbnb underneath the chief operating officer. And we went from 30 employees to 3,000. They're like, why is that not on your res you know, like, why, why is that not on your profile?
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>10:21</time>
Right? So we're almost, and then we're extracting a seven point rubric, which it's called it's it's a we're obviously looking at AI readiness, SaaS readiness. Right? We're looking at communication skill. We're looking at we're looking at growth opportunity.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>10:37</time>
Right? So, have seven proprietary points that we're extracting. And then we look at our business kind of like a zipper. We have a hiring company on one side and you got a can on one side and then mechanical match object is the zipper. And we try to really match specifics.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>10:51</time>
And then we gate, we gate the people in interviews because what we do is if you look at also job opening and like you, you probably have interviewed a lot of people throughout your career, I'm guessing. Right? And sometimes when you job opening, you say is a lot more complicated. It is how you interview is completely different than the job opening. Right?
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>11:07</time>
So, we're also extracting from that to make sure that, the candidates pass a test before they ever interview because a busy executives, you ever have someone come in to your interview and they're like, what do you know about our company? They're like, I don't know anything. Right? And why do they not know anything? Because they're so used to applying to jobs that they don't get they don't get responses back.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>11:25</time>
Right? So you expect them to know everything about your company, but they've been applying to a thousand jobs, no no responses. So they don't they don't do research. Right? So we really gate people, and we find that with, using data to make matches and preparing people, the the LTV stands longer.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>11:43</time>
Right? And also keeping people from scope creep. Right? Like, if you want a GTM guy who knows Clay, who also can outbound, and you think you're gonna hire that for $4,000 in Colombia, you're not. You're gonna hire for 8 grands.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>11:54</time>
That's a $160,000 position in The States. Right? So just helping people with salary bands to understand where the retention sweet spot is. And then and then, you know, giving and creating, onboarding plans, performance improvement plans, and giving people structure, to make these remote hires last because we're not an agency. We're not a BPO.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>12:14</time>
They're your they're your people. But we kinda come in with like the the the structure, right? Like more of like the you know, like helping people understand that like even if you have, if you're running ads and you have a six month sales cycle, don't expect the cash flow ROI in three months, Right?
<cite>Speaker 1:</cite>
<time>12:31</time>
No, no, no.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>12:33</time>
So yeah, you know, we're there just to support long term hires and that's kind of, it's kind of uncomfortable because we're like, hey, you know, like, now what makes you qualified and not qualified is whether you're not going to fire somebody. Right? And like, you don't wanna hire somebody to fire somebody. So like, I'm looking at you like, hey, is this hire gonna be twenty four months? And you're gonna be like, this guy's amazing.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>12:51</time>
I wanna hire more people. Just like, you know, you mentioned, you know, you you don't hire through CloudTask Marketplace, but you said the person was great. Right? And you might hire more people. Right?
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>13:00</time>
So Right. It's more of a and there's nothing wrong with staffing and recruitment. We all solve the same business challenge, which is I need to build a team. Right? It's just that the way we're solving that business challenges with a little bit more intentional matching and intentional support.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>13:16</time>
Right,
<cite>Speaker 1:</cite>
<time>13:18</time>
right. So, just a quick question. I always thought in one of these employer matchmaking services, would be interesting to use AI to do psychological profiles from the outside looking in, having the AI scan social networks, published articles, any, anything that's available to profile and then profile the company as an entity for culture. Yeah. Is there any of that that plays into this?
<cite>Speaker 1:</cite>
<time>13:51</time>
Is there anything that can be or has been automated that way?
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>13:54</time>
Well, the thing is this, it's, it, it, know, where it is a good question, right? So like when I talk to people who are passive, what does a passive candidate mean? It means they have a job, right? And they talk to us and and, you know, what will you find out? Like, a lot of the times you get really you get people that say, you know, I'm happy with my company.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>14:12</time>
They're great. But like, I just don't have a leader training me and I I'm not learning anything. Right. And I'm I'm I'm doing all these things. And and you you you you do find that, you know, you have a lot of talent that they want, they care about culture, right?
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>14:24</time>
They care about ethics or some care about just commissions, right? Some care about, startup culture over enterprise, right? The cool part is that we're matching so well with our seven point system that we don't have to go at, you know, like, like if it's not broken, don't fix it. So like we're already getting twenty four months LTV. So like I don't go deeper into those nuances, but the fact of the matter is we will, right?
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>14:54</time>
I guess, but we're really paying attention to our metrics, if that makes sense. And right now, because we're optimizing and we're in twenty four months, we're we're not necessarily saying, hey, let's get the, you know, the the all this data from the company and research it, but it's obviously something that's real possible. But remember, people are going from like nothing to something, right? Like they're going from like, I put a job opening on LinkedIn, I screen a thousand people. I don't have an onboarding program or training program.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>15:23</time>
Now I'm hiring somebody. So like a lot of support. But you know, the answer is obviously if you take your time and I would recommend obviously somebody who's hiring like a chief operating officer, a chief like, like really executive position, that's going be really integral to your business, probably slow it down and do a little bit deeper of, an analysis. Right. So it's good point to bring up.
<cite>Speaker 1:</cite>
<time>15:47</time>
Yeah. Now I have a quick question. Then I want to get back to you personally, like your origin story with, with, with CloudTask. So, you know, I read this morning, we're all aware that AI is starting to take jobs, pretty universally across the knowledge space. Some more than others, copywriters, obviously paralegals, first year law students, a lot of marketers.
<cite>Speaker 1:</cite>
<time>16:15</time>
I saw that Fiverr, which of course has a whole host of independents, a lot of them in Latin America, but all over the world. It's, its activity is down 16 or 17% in the last quarter. And they're, they're saying that's affected by, by AI. Do you see any of that in your business or are you dealing more with people that are still people facing that are not yet Yeah. Subject to
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>16:45</time>
I think the reason why we're seeing an uptick is because we're focused on being an operator marketplace first. So we have like AI SDRs, prompt engineers. We have even chief of staff that are AI focused. So like we're we're we're more we're more on the side of people that already are using, Claude using systems. They're already building out and it had workflows using make.com.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>17:13</time>
Right? So fortunately for us, we are, we're beginning hired by a lot of AI companies. Believe it or not. They're hiring us for even just, implementation teams. So like, like, a lot of the customer success teams are building the workflows.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>17:30</time>
So I think there's a change in the type of work, if that makes sense, where people are going to go from, they're going to go from rep to operator. Right? Right. And, and, and we're trying to be part of that transformation where a person will hire an SDR, but an SDR that's cold calling on Salesfinity and dialing a thousand numbers a day and using Claude to evaluate their own calls and coach themselves. Right?
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>17:55</time>
So, I think what you find is that people that are not using AI are getting replaced by people who are. But like where that goes, I don't know. Right? And and I'm not, you know, I I I think that it's just the shift. If you looked at like before SaaS, people were writing one handwritten email a day.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>18:13</time>
Right? And they're writing more. So, I think we're just trying to find that equilibrium of like what the new work looks like. But, you know, like a lot of jobs get replaced and don't come back then, it we got all got bigger problems. Right?
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>18:26</time>
And I think Yeah. There's no moat from a SaaS companies anymore either. Right? I almost think that service companies have more remote than SaaS companies. Right?
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>18:33</time>
It's true.
<cite>Speaker 1:</cite>
<time>18:35</time>
It's interesting. It's interesting you're mentioning customer success and for our listeners, in today's posted episode, it was with Nick Mehta, the founding CEO of Gainsight. Many consider him the godfather of customer success. He wrote he co wrote, the book on the matter, in 2016.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>19:00</time>
So I didn't read it though, but he's a great guy.
<cite>Speaker 1:</cite>
<time>19:03</time>
Yeah. A lot Yeah, he's fantastic. I know him as a good personal friend, and obviously, a profession professional to follow. Nick and I spoke extensively about, AI's effect on customer success and its adjunct area of customer support. But so back to you, you have a very good point.
<cite>Speaker 1:</cite>
<time>19:31</time>
You might actually be placing, placing people, connecting people to these companies that help them update their workforce, you know, as they need to instrument with AI.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>19:46</time>
Where we're
<cite>Speaker 1:</cite>
<time>19:47</time>
presenting Sounds like that business is doing well for you.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>19:49</time>
I'm like, it's all perspective right now. It's not as good as Nick Mehta and Gainsight, but, you know, I, we're fortunate to have a lot of really good talent in our marketplace. I'm a super talented team and, and, and, you know, I look forward to obviously, well, not so obvious, I didn't say it, but, but I look forward to building free universities for Latamia Caribbean, where I can just really start teaching people, some of these skills and, you know, it's not, what's nice is sometimes I talk to candidates and I, you know, they, they tell me what they want to earn. Right. And the, and I tell, know I I tell them and we use our, we, we have something called the role intelligence, system.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>20:28</time>
And it kind of starts back being like, oh, you want to earn this, you're going to go to these YouTube videos, you're going learn how these workflows and you're going to become an operator, a customer success operator, not a, you know, a, so it's like, it's telling people like, you know, like what you need to do to basically not only get the job you want today. And that this was always the truth five, ten, fifteen years ago, the change was just slower. Right? Now the change is super fast. Right.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>20:56</time>
Which is hard to keep up with, but yeah, it's, it's, it's nice trying to be able to tell people like what they need to learn, what they'll earn, and then they bring those, transformations to the companies they work for.
<cite>Speaker 1:</cite>
<time>21:08</time>
I see. I see. Yeah. I have a couple of more questions for you, Amir. So bring us back to the formation of CloudTask.
<cite>Speaker 1:</cite>
<time>21:18</time>
First of all, are you funded or is this self funded enterprise? Yeah.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>21:22</time>
Bootstrap company.
<cite>Speaker 1:</cite>
<time>21:23</time>
Yeah. That's great. That's great. You get to keep owner equity. So, Yeah.
<cite>Speaker 1:</cite>
<time>21:32</time>
Was your first iteration of CloudTask a success and you've built upon that? Or did you have some pivots along the way where you refined your model with increased learning in the market?
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>21:43</time>
CloudTask original company was cash flow positive, successful and being very transparent. I know you want to hear the real deal, Jonathan. I worked for companies like, Apollo. I was friends with them and I always wanted to be a SaaS company. And I, tried to pivot and I put like close to $3,000,000 of my own money in a in a failed business.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>21:59</time>
That's when you realize when, you you're like, holy shit, I should have raised money. And very fortunate I was in a position to, to tighten the belt and to, focus on, you know, rebuilding this. Now I have to, you know, sell my company for 90,000,000, not 80,000,000 in ten years to, you know, make up for the past five years of, wrong pivot to put. There's the pros and cons of bootstrapping. You do own your own company, but you do take the risk.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>22:24</time>
And, you know, one of the piece of advice I can give to founders is that, time compounds. The grass is always greener is is always gonna be the case. Be happy for what you have. And it's hard to change your company's identity. Right?
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>22:39</time>
So sometimes you might wanna sell it, let it be running because it was with all the momentum we had, it was hard to change the course. Right? And it there was a different nobody taught me that. Right? If that makes sense.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>22:51</time>
And you look at a company like, you know, Facebook, they became Meta on the stock market. Well, Meta is not Facebook, Meta is for the metaverse. Right? They lost like $3,040,000,000,000 dollars. They they got the money, you know, like, yeah, look at jaguar.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>23:03</time>
Right? That his ads, and then now they say that it was sales went down 98%. So, it happens, but sometimes it happens to companies that have deep, deep pockets. And sometimes it could happen to you when you're you know, when you're you don't have those deep pockets. Anybody listening to this, I I would say just keep keep focusing and keep compounding.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>23:22</time>
Right? And I am sure you've seen stories like that, Jonathan, too, where you probably work to people who like, just keep keep on going ten more years. Right? And sometimes you're competing against people that own 5% of their company. Right?
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>23:34</time>
So you also like, you might look at people who are they raise money, they do these cool things, but they don't really have control. Alright? And and, you know, they're, you know, there's so many different stories that you don't see. Right. You could, you you know, the guy selling I have a friend of mine, shout out to my friend.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>23:49</time>
I'm not gonna mention his name. He has a Christmas light service company. Right? He probably nets 3,500,000 a year. He's look it's probably gonna sell for 40.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>23:58</time>
And he, you know, he's been collecting Christmas trees and assets and light bulbs. Right? And trucks. And he it doesn't seem so fancy. Right?
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>24:07</time>
But he's doing very well for himself. And it goes to show you that sometimes it's the, it's sometimes the problems you solve that you don't think about. Right? Like, where's my who's putting up my Christmas lights for the city. Right?
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>24:18</time>
Or the or the, the mall. Right? So, you know, I think we live in a world where, you know, everybody wants to be Nick Meta, right? And and there's one for every million person, right? Yeah.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>24:30</time>
So, you know, I did have hard pivot, John. I gotta I'll I'll admit it. I'll be honest. I'll be vulnerable. It sucks.
<cite>Speaker 1:</cite>
<time>24:37</time>
You know what? So listen, that's the, that's the ethos in Silicon Valley is if you're going to fail, fail fast and learn from it. I'm just hoping you have, maybe you have a lesson behind here you can share. You already did a couple of them about, you know. I have another one.
<cite>Speaker 1:</cite>
<time>24:53</time>
What was the core of the lesson, like the humbling moment? Was it that you were selling the wrong thing to the wrong group or,
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>25:05</time>
Oh, well, it's a few things. It was like hiring hiring a team that like didn't build my product and do my didn't build my MVP and I could have built it better. Like, I'm not a product guy. I'm not a CTO. And like, I built more with CloudTco in ninety days than they did in four years.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>25:19</time>
Right? Yes. That's on me. Right? So the big thing is like, being controlled the product, being controlled by design.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>25:26</time>
Right? Right. And and also at the same time, focus on something that's simple. Right? Because like our, our buyers just didn't Okay.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>25:38</time>
This is a tough lesson, but you've probably heard it. I thought that buyers wanted help And they didn't.
<cite>Speaker 1:</cite>
<time>25:44</time>
I see.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>25:44</time>
So I thought they wanted to hire the right agency. I thought they wanted to hire the right person, but they don't. They wanted to hear what was told. They wanted to hear what they wanted to hear. So when I became very customer centric being like, Hey, this is broken the way people are buying and I want to help them buy better.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>26:03</time>
And by better, I mean, like not lose money. I got crushed. So it's, it's kinda like, it's kinda hard to admit that like, if you try to help people that don't want your help, even if you're ethically in the right place, you will become the asshole to them and you'll lose your money. So it's very unfortunate it works like that. And I'm gonna ask you a question.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>26:21</time>
Like, have you ever noticed that? That in some businesses where like, you're not rewarded for saying the truth of being customer centric, where customers just want to hear what they want to hear. Is that have you ever experienced that in The US market?
<cite>Speaker 1:</cite>
<time>26:32</time>
So absolutely. And I see this all the time. A disruptive product comes in and requires a forced change in a process or mindset with expectations that have to be too short compared to how humans really change and adapt, you know, ten, twenty years, and they need it in a matter of quarters. So it's the companies that are requiring the change in what you do too fast, and too, in too much depth that seem to spin out and, and fail. If you can come in and, and be closely adjacent to the process that they have already, and then slowly over time improve and change the product and bring people along that change management process as part of a disruptive technology company is an imperative.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>27:33</time>
Yeah, I agree with you. Yeah, agree.
<cite>Speaker 1:</cite>
<time>27:36</time>
In this case, were trying to change their way of thinking about the problem they think they were solving. And that's just too hard to do. Yeah. That turns you into an evangelist.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>27:46</time>
They wanted what they wanted and they wanted you to be a yes person, the second you said, know, you're going lose money and you're not going get they took it as an insult, right?
<cite>Speaker 1:</cite>
<time>27:55</time>
Yeah. Hey, in my business, I feel an absolute duty in counseling founders and CEOs, you know, about the honest truth after thirty five years of pattern recognition myself, you know, you're off track, maybe sometimes it's your baby is ugly, the product is off. Some take it seriously and they've gone on to be greatly successful. Not that I'm the be all end all, but I always bring the research with my team. Some, you know, shrugged it off or even got hostile to the idea.
<cite>Speaker 1:</cite>
<time>28:35</time>
So I know it well. Yeah.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>28:38</time>
Yeah. It happens.
<cite>Speaker 1:</cite>
<time>28:39</time>
Well, I'm gonna first agree with you Amir.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>28:42</time>
It's gonna be a series a company that that wants to get product market fit and wants to go series B. And I'm gonna say, I'm gonna introduce you to Jonathan Buckley because this is the exact type of founder and the exact type of situation he helps because I also recognize patterns. And and, those are the introductions I like to make to people because it's, you know, it's it's it's he works out. Right? Like the person I'm hiring, I'm working with that was coming to my office from Chile.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>29:07</time>
He used to be head of product and SEO for Toptal, right? And they're a billion dollar marketplace, right? Who better to hire than someone who's been there done that, right? Right. Cool.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>29:16</time>
Yeah. This has been awesome, Excellent.
<cite>Speaker 1:</cite>
<time>29:20</time>
So Amir Reiter, I want to thank you, of CloudTask and, thank you very much for joining us here on We Built It Because We Had To. You've shared some great lessons, for all to learn from. And you will be able to find this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. It will be posted to LinkedIn. Amir, it's a pleasure to speak with you today.
<cite>Speaker 2:</cite>
<time>29:49</time>
Thank you. See you.

He Lost $3M on a Failed Pivot — Here's What CloudTask Does Differently (Amir Reiter)

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