Ep # 189: Why Post-Sales Messaging Matters More Than Launch Messaging ft. Fahad Aziz (Founder and CEO, PuppyDog)

Fahad Aziz 00:05 So those journeys in sales and marketing are very well established. But what's not taken too much attention or focus is customer journeys, right? How, when the customer has signed up and been a customer for almost a year, two years, how do we monitor and improve their experience, get them to use the product more, and on and on? Intro 00:30 Welcome to Across the Funnel, where we dig into concrete Go-To-Market moves across sales, customer success, and account management so you can build revenue that lasts. Brought to you by Hyperengage and Dextego. Adil Saleh 00:46 Hey, greetings, everybody. This is Across the Funnel. I'm your host, Adil. Been there for a long time. It's so hard for us to bring unique stories, and that's why we're cutting down on some of the episodes, cutting it down to half. Previously, we were doing six episodes a week. Now we're gonna be doing three episodes a week and bringing some of the most influential people, the founders, specifically father founders of these tech companies from SF, Austin, San Antonio is gonna be big too, and New York City, to bring on these founders and their stories and how they're going about decision making and making on the top line with this AI and all of this. Today, we're gonna be talking purely about product marketing and how big of a challenge it is for a lot of B2B SaaS core subscription-based products and multi-product companies as well. That is why we brought today, brother Fahad Aziz, who's Co-founder and CEO of PuppyDog. Prior to this, he was partially part of AI Fund as well, funded by Andrew Ng. Everybody knows, at least in the Valley, who he is, and he's been actively investing into multiple startups, like five or six of them. Prior to that, he's been the technical co-founder of Caremerge that got acquired later in 2022. A great 10-year journey. Such a huge impact it made when it comes to chronic service management for senior citizens and a lot of other services. So we're gonna be talking about all of his prior background merged into how he's positioning PuppyDog and how this is helping product marketing teams win. Thank you very much, brother, for taking the time. Fahad Aziz 02:33 Oh, thank you for inviting me. Adil Saleh 02:36 Love it. So now I know that starting off the bat, early 2010, 2011, starting a company such as in healthcare vertical, it has been challenging, not just on the regulation side of things. There's so much of regulated industries and all. How did you come up with that idea, and how was that journey in a nutshell for ten years? And then you got acquired, of course, and everybody knows how Caremerge grew, expanded into the healthcare sector overall. So how was that experience and then starting the inception of PuppyDog? Fahad Aziz 03:13 Great. Well, the experience was incredible, but before we go into talk about one of the success stories, there were a lot of not-so-successful stories before that. So I started my career 23 years back, and from the very beginning, I always believed in building impactful startups. In the first ten years of my career, I tried to do many startups and made several fatal mistakes. For that reason, none of them worked out. The only thing that came out of those failures was a lot of learning. When we started Caremerge in 2011, one of the things we were very careful about was not to make any mistakes that we had made in the past. So we built on our learnings to create this company. So the first thing we did with Caremerge was that we wanted to understand the customer. We wanted to understand the challenges that they were having. The best way to do that is that you walk in their shoes, you live in their places. So we wanted to build a technology to help seniors, to help people living in the communities. For that reason, we spent over three months in those communities. We were shadowing the nurses, the family members. We were talking to a lot of residents. That gave us the first direct access to the customer, the future customers, and helped us understand the challenges. When you ask them what their problems are, on the surface they will tell you something. But when you go deeper and ask them multiple times, only then do you come down to the root cause, right? So we were able to figure out that some of the challenges these communities were having were related to lack of communication, right? All the friction is because people are not telling others what's happening. So now, understanding that there's a root cause, we said, “Okay, let's resolve this. Let's fix this with technology.” So that's how Caremerge started, and the communities we spent time in also became our first-paying customers. Then from there onward, for the next 10 years, we kept growing the business. Just a few months after COVID, we got an offer for acquisition, went through the process, and then it got acquired. So that's the story about Caremerge. Adil Saleh 06:05 Interesting. Quick notice on this. I know that validating your hypothesis, going into trenches with your ICPs, is super critical. If you just take it back from 2012 to now, 2026, how do you see it different? Like someone building in healthcare, a product as a service or a service base productized platform, what should be the first thing to be able to validate their ideas in this? Has anything changed? Is anything different? Is it more noisy today, more regulated with all of this AI and all this? Fahad Aziz 06:44 Yeah. Number one, it doesn't really matter if it's today or it was ten years back. In order to validate the idea, you have to talk to a lot of customers and potential customers because only then will you be able to assess whether this is a real problem, a big enough problem to solve. This is where a good founder stands out. When he talks to a lot of people, he can look for the patterns and the feedback that he's getting, right? He's not looking at the surface conversation. He's actually seeing, out of these thirty conversations, there was something very common between all of them. That's what a good founder is able to do. He can pinpoint that, “Okay, I think the problem lies there.” So that has not changed, right? Everyone can tell you that with AI, you can do all this research and so on. That's great, but at the end of the day, you have to talk to the customers, and you have to ask some real direct questions. For instance, you can say, “Hey, you're telling me about this problem. That's great. Tell me, how big is this problem for you today? Are you willing to pay to solve this problem? And how much would you pay for it?” Some customers will tell you, “This is a really big problem. It keeps me up all night.” But when it comes down to payment, they'll say, “Well, I don't have the budget,” or, “I don't think I can get it approved,” or, “I can only pay five hundred dollars.” Right? So those are all data points that you need to make a decision whether this is a problem worth building a solution for. That has not changed. What has changed is the appetite from the investors. In the past, they would give you more time to build a company, months and years and all that. But today, the expectation is that you need to go to the market really fast. Whoever has this edge of distribution or Go-To-Market are the winners. Partly because if you have a problem and you have built a solution, it's very easy to replicate that. So your window to go to the market is very, very short now. If in the past it was three years or four years, now it's, I would say, one year. Adil Saleh 09:29 Yeah, even less. A lot of these technology and capabilities of AI that you can build across data, and we talk about GTM tooling in our space. I love the fact that you are still spotlighting on the way to get the upfront commitment. Because a lot of these ICPs, if I talk about myself and a lot of my founder friends, they're going bottom up. Let's say if they're building for account management or sales, they're going after account executives or CSMs, and every CSM tells them, “Hey, why not? We'll just use the product.” They use it two months, but they're not decision-makers. They're not able to see it big enough for themselves to go and advocate to their VPs to make a payment upfront. That window is pretty short. You're a small handful of people on the team. It's so hard to crack distribution if you go bottom up too. We'll talk about it later, how it is playing around at PuppyDog. But this is again one of the reasons a lot of these high-growth companies are focused on top-bottom. Or even if they're focusing on bottom up, they are just making some sort of a product-led motion where they can pay a very small amount or lower tier, which is one of the hardest jobs in GTM tooling because you're integrating a whole bunch of data and tokens and everything. We'll talk about it later. So now talking about building next to PuppyDog, I know that product marketing is the center of everything. You talk about distribution and sales, you could talk about cold calling and everything, that's fine. But when someone gets into the product, how product marketing does, especially the onboarding part, which the survey that we've written down, and not only for this episode, we had this being translated to other episodes too, is more than thirty-five percent of the customers actually churn in the first two weeks post-kickoff, well before adoption. There are some reports that I've read, like more than sixty percent actually quit in the first three months without adopting. Lack of features, lack of stakeholder activation. There's so much moving parts into the onboarding to adoption stage. Could you walk us through a little bit how the customers are winning during this critical stage where more than fifty percent of the customers actually churn or indicate churn, and you can forecast it later before you even know it? That's why Hyperengage comes into play to help them forecast. But could you walk us through this entire journey? How did you navigate through this cycle while building PuppyDog and doing pilot initial phases? Fahad Aziz 12:01 Yeah, and you raise a good point. It's not just about churn. It's also about growth. So if you look at the enterprise customers and they show their revenue growth, 50 to 80% comes from existing customers, right? How do you upsell? How do you cross-sell? That's also part of product marketing. Now, product marketing historically has never received the recognition that it deserved. I remember when we hired our first product marketer 10 years back, I had a lot of questions about what this person was going to do. Why do we need that? Why can't we just hire a marketer, right? The reason was that it was not really established how critical this role is. Companies that have grown with a lot of PLG movement have proven that product marketers have been the reason, or one of the factors, that helped them grow so fast. Now, today, it's very different. Companies are building products. They're building products really fast. Instead of releasing once every six months, they're releasing every four months or maybe sooner, right? In order to market that, you need people who are as capable as the product managers to do that, and that's where product marketers come in. Their job is to keep up the pace of anything that's being built and also being released. What released means is that the customers that you have know about those features. Adil Saleh 13:45 Absolutely. Fahad Aziz 13:46 Right. So today, if you look at any SaaS subscription, you are paying a certain amount for licensing, but you don't even know all the capabilities that that SaaS platform has to offer. As a result, on average, you're using thirty to forty percent of the capabilities but paying for a hundred percent. So the responsibility comes down to the product marketers to have higher adoption, right? How to get from thirty, forty percent to sixty, seventy, eighty percent, because then you reduce the churn and increase the retention. Then there's also opportunity to upsell, cross-sell, increase licensing, and so on. So product marketer has become sort of a most important role and department in the companies now. For that reason, if you go and search for the jobs for product marketing, you will be surprised there are thousands of opportunities on LinkedIn looking for people who have product background with marketing background, specifically for the titles of product marketing. Adil Saleh 14:55 Right. So now talking about some of the burning pains that we've collected speaking to all these companies, and a lot of this funnel that we speak about, and mostly we speak about customer success, how they're able to make customers win. This is more like communication, product usage, CRM activities, support tickets, and all. But like you mentioned, being an underrated organization, this has not been the talk of the town, how they're articulating and translating the product vision and features and everything into a marketing asset, into a story for customers. For example, we're building a signal thing. Signal can work for so many things, and the only thing that our customers know is, “Hey, you can build a signal for onboarding. You can build up playbooks. You get triggers on Slack, and it gets updated on CRM,” and that's it. So no one on our team, quite honestly, is making an effort to translate it for fifty-plus use cases and fifty-plus stories that could have echoed with more than hundred thousand people, like CSMs, account managers, and they actually face it day to day. This is their everyday life. They're doing customer research. They have triggers for meetings. They have triggers for briefing. So how do you see this problem and the potential of product marketing in a SaaS model? This is not just for existing features, but some new features too. Articulating and translating the stories for multi-use cases and making it personable for the customers. It is more in the customer education piece. Being a product marketing, how it turns into customer education, which drives a lot of sales. This is the highest tier, I would say, of marketing because education drives everything, right? Fahad Aziz 16:43 Right. No, that's a really good point. That's the journey we started with PuppyDog. We believe that product marketing needs more AI capabilities to be able to generate this content that is engaging, that customers would love to watch and learn. But to your point, we soon realized that the challenge is not just the content. It's the relevant content, right? To your point, the use cases. So if I am in finance and I'm in a leadership role, and I want to know about the product, I have different reasons to learn about this product. I have different use cases. But if I am in retail and I'm, let's say, an operator, and I'm looking at the same product, I want to know how I can use this product. Right? That becomes very challenging, that not only do you have to define the different personas that you're selling into, but more than that, you also have to understand all these people and their attributes and their profile, their job, their background. What are they talking about on LinkedIn? What are they posting? And all this stuff. The more you know about these people, the more you can tailor the content, personalize the content. So now when they're looking at the video, and the video is talking about their challenges in their industry, talking about other customers in the space who are using it to give them the comfort, now they're more leaning towards and saying, “Okay, I think this is something worth looking at.” Similarly, in the world of onboarding, you don't want to, if you have new features, send it out to everyone. That doesn't work really well because half of that customer may be using that feature. What really works is that if I get an email, and it talks about something that's really relevant to me because I'm not using that feature. I'm using the other three features, but not this one. But if the same email goes to you, you get a very different email that talks about a thing that you are not using, right? This becomes sort of a build-up. So you know that Adil is only using three of the six features. Let's keep telling him about the fourth feature. Once he starts working on the fourth, let's talk to him about the fifth. Give him an offer about the fifth. Give him like six months free. So that's how you build up and go from Adil using three features to using five features. That's the magic about AI and product marketing, and that's something that we've been offering to our customers with PuppyDog. Adil Saleh 19:25 Love it. This is a great point. A lot of these product marketing teams, per se, think whether they should go with the product team or with the marketing team. So I believe personally, based on my intuition and some of the things that I've worked at hands-on with product managers, it is more on the product side. Because marketing, of course, would sell itself if you build education that is centered toward the product. As to your example, if product marketing is living closer to the product, not the marketing as much as the marketing, you have a deeper understanding of how customers perceive value differently. This is much relatable for our product too. There are a whole bunch of different values, but we gotta know exactly how customers are perceiving values differently. There could be a whole set of different power features for different customers. This is super important, and this is where a platform like PuppyDog, of course, we already signed up for it. My other co-founder already signed up for it long back when you started, but we were small back then, and now we're going to use it for this sole reason, how this gets translated based on how customers are perceiving value or their business outcomes out of those feature or product-related stories. So what is your experience like if we just talk about post-sales at PuppyDog? Thinking about only the onboarding segment, which I already mentioned, that it's more than fifty percent of people that churn. Of course, onboarding takes, in the mid-market enterprise, up to three months, and it goes in phases. But of course, you can definitely track success, measure success, or derive success during those stages too. I still believe that this is something that a lot of people doubt, that even in the enterprise segment, you can still have a threshold of one month to measure that progress or success around the onboarding, even if that is big enough for enterprise in terms of time and window. So how do you see it in the mid-market? How do you apply all of this strategy? Given your background and this incredible product, how is that post-sale going? Fahad Aziz 21:32 Yeah. So the use cases vary from the size of the company for sure. If you're talking about SMBs and startups, their key challenge is to get, as soon as the customer signs up, how to get them to see the value of the product in less than five minutes, right? And offer them the self-serve experience so they can see the value. So that's more of the use case for SMBs. Now mid-market and enterprise customers, very different use case. They have thousands of customers, right? All they want to do is that they want them to keep using the product more and more. If they're launching new capabilities, they should be trying it, or at least they are aware of it. So there are a lot of customer journeys that are being defined in these enterprise and mid-market customers. Over the years, technology companies have done an amazing job in creating a buyer's journey, where they meet the buyer when they're thinking about getting a software and then follow them all the way till the time they make the decision to buy your software. So those journeys in sales and marketing are very well established. But what's not taken too much attention or focus is customer journeys, right? How, when the customer has signed up and been a customer for almost a year, two years, how do we monitor and improve their experience, get them to use the product more, and on and on? Because churn is the most painful. It hurts you more than the acquisition challenges, right? Since it's more important, and when you look at the large enterprises, churn could be, we're talking about hundreds and thousands of dollars, right? And if you're able to chart their journey and be able to control that and be part of it, that's not saving, that's huge revenue for you. So this is how these large tech companies are thinking about it. When we work with them, what we see is that now there's a little bit more focus on, number one, the quality of the content, the relevance of the content. Adil Saleh 24:17 The contextual relevance. Fahad Aziz 24:19 Contextual relevance, right? If I'm getting an email, it should talk about me and my challenges. I don't want to know what's happening in the finance industry because I am in, let's say, healthcare, right? My challenges are very different than finance. But if the message is about me and how my counterparts in the industry are using this, now that makes a lot of sense. Adil Saleh 24:45 Interesting. Now sticking on this onboarding piece, how big of a challenge do you see, even using PuppyDog? How are people using it differently? Like high-growth teams really winning the onboarding piece, and they have the greatest numbers in onboarding adoption. The goal, as you mentioned, is always about time to value. They want to deliver value the fastest, and the onboarding teams are turning into product marketing teams any day. Now a lot of these roles are, of course, accumulating sales, success, revenue, sales. There are so many things happening because companies are trying to do more with less on a high level. A lot of funded companies have board pressure and so much, might be different reasons for different companies. But how do you see this role as a product marketing winning to successfully onboard people and adopt people, mitigate the time to value part, and increase the adoption rate at PuppyDog? Fahad Aziz 25:46 Yeah. So this role has been around for many years in enterprise, mid-market, larger, fast-growing companies. So this is not new. As I mentioned, we hired the first product marketer around fourteen years back. What has changed now is that the product marketers have much more responsibility. In the past, they could depend on agencies. They could wait for four weeks to get one video, right? That's not the luxury they have today. The turnaround has to be super quick, super personalized, and so on. That's a challenge. That means that the product marketing team has to also adopt all these AI tools that are available at their expense. Just yesterday, we were at one of our customers, very large, over a billion dollars in revenue, and they showed us this video that they created. It was a short sixty-second video, nothing out of the ordinary. It took them four to six weeks to get this done by an agency. Now, with the AI tools, they are able to do this in less than three days or two days because AI can create the story, it can create the script, it can create all the visuals, it can follow all the brand guidelines, and it can auto-review it. By the time it does all that and gives you the first version, which could be probably in half an hour or less, now you have more time just to review it, run it by your compliance and all that stuff, and you're ready, and you can launch it. So that's the power of product marketing that's gonna be now available to all these companies. This is also good news for the buyers or the customers because you're not gonna be struggling to figure out if there's anything new that you need. You will find out because companies know what you need. Adil Saleh 27:56 Absolutely. Evaluation is big. This evaluation time, a lot of these companies on the other side of the table, like mid-sized enterprise companies, are spending huge amounts of time to evaluate tooling, to figure out what tool works best. This helps that cycle too, to mitigate that time of tooling to evaluate. For example, we were just looking for a tool for documentation back in the day when we started with Notion. Then Notion became collaborative, but it took us a good one and a half month to actually get six or seven team members on it. Now we're paying around hundred and fifty, hundred and sixty bucks a month just for documentation, but it does a lot more things too. Again, the evaluation part is still big. So many tools create a lot of noise too. That is what brings me to the next segment too. Now you talk about AI video creation, you talk about personalized videos, be it product videos or other videos. There are so many big players coming in the game. It's a pretty noisy category too. So how, as a founder, are you coping up with the competition, positioning this? As you mentioned earlier, you're going more narrow than broad, but going narrow is good. But four or five years down, how are you envisioning all of this? How are you seeing this category move? Fahad Aziz 29:10 Yeah. I think for us, we are building a platform. This is an end-to-end experience, so anything that product marketing teams would need, we plan to offer that into our platform. The way we differentiate ourselves is we are not solving this one problem of how to create a video. We are taking an AI-first approach and saying, okay, if AI is using the product, how would they use it and how would they create the videos, right? So basically what it does is that now you can just point to the product, and because of our AI-first approach, it will look at the product, it will look at your target customers, and it will start creating all the content that you need and then start personalizing the content. So we see a future where there is little engagement from product marketers. They will depend a lot on AI to do all this for them. What it also does is that because you're able to create the content so quickly, you can do a lot of A/B testing. That has historically been a huge problem. You will spend months to create something, a messaging, positioning, content, visuals, and it just doesn't connect with the buyers. By the time you have to change it, you spend another three months. So with this, you can quickly run your A/B testing and say, “Okay, does this message connect or does that message connect?” Then scale from that point. Those are some of the capabilities that product marketers struggle with today. But with an AI-first platform, those will be a native part of the offering. What we believe is that as the product development speeds up with all these tools, product marketing will also be at the same pace. It's not there yet. It's far behind. But I think with tools like ours, we'll get there. We will empower product marketing teams. Adil Saleh 31:39 Right. Now, also thinking from an AI-first and AI-native approach, a lot of these big players like Anthropic, they're trying for every company to be MCP-first. Because a lot of these product marketers, at least my team, as small as one person on product marketing, they use Claude. They build skills like copywriting, storytelling, product marketing, so many skills. They actually navigate through the best messaging for email and output and everything. So for all these product marketers sitting in the LLMs, in a chat interface, how do you think that PuppyDog sits where they actually work, within their workflow? Fahad Aziz 32:18 Yeah. Well, it does remind me of the App Store when that was launched. At that point, Apple was creating all the apps, and it felt at some point that Apple would create all the apps, so what will everyone else do? You may not remember, but when the App Store was launched, or even before that, the YouTube app was built by Apple. It was not a YouTube app. Similarly, the music app was very popular. So at that time, you could make an argument that there cannot be any other app, no Pandora, no Spotify, no YouTube Music and stuff, right? But turns out that as a provider, as a marketplace, as a foundational layer, there's much you can do. So you can make an argument that, hey, I can hire people who can use Claude and they can make the whole thing. That's great, but then you'll have to hire people to do that. You have to spend millions on tokens. So in some cases, when the product is very straightforward, and we are talking about products that are, let's say, HR software, performance management software, which are very much databases, right, I can believe that they will be disrupted. When there's no creativity, when it's all about putting the data in, getting the data out, after some permission, some security, and audit, they will be wiped out. The CRMs of this world are gonna have a very difficult time to stay and stick around. But that also opens the opportunities for more interesting projects, more complex projects. So yeah, I think it's no different than when the App Store was launched, right? It's just that there are different types of challenges and opportunities. Adil Saleh 34:23 And you're also thinking of building MCP-first, like you can connect your LLM or you can connect your MD files into it, the marketing assets that you have in your LLM into PuppyDog, and from there you can take on. Fahad Aziz 34:38 Well, we have that capability, but in all practical terms, working with enterprise customers, which is our focus, they are still very far behind in adopting that technology. In order to get them to approve talking to a server, that's another couple of months, and then they have to allocate resources. So they're a little behind in that adoption. Once they get there, we will be there. But at this time, they have real problems with customer acquisition, with adoption, customer engagement, growth, upsell, cross-sell, and we are making available all the tools that they need to make it easier for them. Adil Saleh 35:30 Yeah. So, Fahad, I've been following your journey for quite some time, and it's so many years ever since you got into SaaS back in 2016, 2017. A lot of these people would also like to know what kind of technology you are most interested in as an investor. Of course, as a consultant, advisor slash investor, angel, what kind of technologies or categories can you mention that you think are going to be growing super fast at this time? Of course, it's so hard to predict too, because you never know what's gonna happen next with these LLMs and capabilities and what it can disrupt and open all of a sudden. But just from your viewpoint, sitting in technology and, of course, the tech capital of the world, how do you see it for me and for all the founders listening? Fahad Aziz 36:19 Yeah. I think it's a very difficult time to be an investor. I'll tell you, more than half of the investors that I spoke with in the last two, three years, they're no more VCs. They have moved on to other jobs because it's just incredibly difficult now to find a good startup in this mix of thousands of startups. So in the past, the criteria was very simple. You look at how big the problem is, you look at how good the solution is, and you look at the team and say they have done this before, they can do it a second time. That was the criteria. But that criteria doesn't apply anymore, right? Anyone can copy your idea or a problem. Anyone can build a solution. There are thousands of people who are second-time, third-time founders. But we have seen that young kids from college are doing much better in some cases than these seasoned entrepreneurs. So I think the opportunity is on the distribution. When you look at a startup, you're looking at how soon they can acquire their customers, what's their Go-To-Market, have they signed any channel partners, have they done a lot of marketing, do they know how to bring customers to the website, and all that stuff. So that's one very important criterion. For me personally, when I invest as an angel, I actually just look at the founder and see what's the passion. How much is he willing to give for this startup? What compromises has he made? Has he quit his job? Is he doing it full-time? Has he burned all his bridges? And on and on. So for me, that's more important than the problem itself because we cannot be an expert of every problem. We can only see the problem through the lens of the founder. Adil Saleh 38:30 Absolutely. Yes. I love the way that you, and this has always been the golden rule, betting on people. I just spoke to one of the VCs at Y Combinator when I started, and they said the same thing, like, “Hey, if we think and if we see through a founder that is compassionate and hungry enough, and of course widely interested about solving this problem, the rest of everything gets secondary.” Of course, technology, addressable market, that's fine. But these people that have the wild hunger actually make things possible. A lot of them pivot three months down, four months down. Perfect. Anything that you think makes you excited this time, looking at PuppyDog and a lot of investments that you've done? I just read some. Atoms, I know that I bought some products when I was in New York last year. Red Wagon, Casper, yeah, I'm familiar with those two. How did those experiences pan out for you? Not in terms of numbers, but just an experience, like the impact that they're creating. Plus, what makes you excited on top of this? We are midway through 2026, but going forward, a lot of people are now tracking months and quarters rather than years because so much is changing so fast. Fahad Aziz 39:54 Yeah. I think when you invest in such an early stage, you have to understand what you're getting into. That's necessarily not a financial return, right? The possibility of that is low at this stage, if you are the first 10 people to write the cheque. So for me personally, I have a few motivations why I invest. Number one, I talk or meet with the founder, and I like their passion, and I just want to support them. For me, that's really important. Number two is that I learn a lot from them. How they're building, how they're going to the market, what tools they're using, what their marketing strategies are. That learning, that you get the inside access to them, you only get it when you are part of the team in advisory or investor and whatnot. So as much as they're thinking that they're learning from me or all that stuff, I am learning a lot more from them. That's the second thing. Number one is that it's no financial return. Number two, I learn from them and their experiences. Number three is, when you see these companies grow and become successful, that's a feeling that you have of some satisfaction, that you were part of their journey from the very beginning. For me, that's not only true for the companies that I invested in, but dozens of other companies that I've advised. I just watch, sitting back in the room, seeing their success, watching them raise funding and funding and funding. For me, that's a lot of satisfaction. Their success feels like my success to me. So those are the reasons I invest in startups at such an early stage. I advise everyone to do that because you can invest in stocks and all that stuff, that's great, but that doesn't build the community. That doesn't have any impact. It just builds your wealth. Adil Saleh 42:21 Absolutely. Yeah. The fulfillment level is not that. Like, you invest in Apple or Tesla, you don't feel like a core part of it, and it's not so personal to you. I love the fulfillment part. Great. Perfect. So, Fahad bhai, it was really, really nice meeting you. I was so looking forward to this conversation, and I'm so glad that we made it generally candid and spontaneous. That's how I always get the best knowledge from people on the other side. The core reason for starting this and investing so much of my time and everything is to learn from people's experiences because I believe I don't get to live long enough to have them all myself. So it's always great to have people that know better than you and have been there longer than you. So thank you very much for being such a great contributor and such a great supporter. Fahad Aziz 43:11 No, thank you so much for hosting this. It was great talking to you, and keep up the good work. That's a great exercise that you do. Adil Saleh 43:18 Thank you very much again for that. Fahad Aziz 43:20 Thank you. Take care. Outro 43:22 Thank you very much for listening to Across the Funnel. If you got one useful GTM idea out of this show today, please share this with a teammate and hit follow. Explore Hyperengage at hyperengage.io and Dextego at dextego.com.