Lessons From a Serial Entrepreneur: Wissam Tabbara of Truebase

Ethan Peyton: Hey everybody, and welcome to the Startup Savant podcast. I'm your host, Ethan, and this is a show about the stories, challenges, and triumphs of fast scaling startups and the founders who run them. Our guest on the show today is Wissam Tabara, founder and CEO of Truebase. Wassam is a multiple time founder with two successful exits so far. 

When he's not working on Truebase, he plays the advisor and mentor roles to several startups and founders. And in order to keep this intro short, I'm gonna let Wissam fill us in on the particulars of TrueBase. But before we get started, if you're enjoying the show, the best way to support us is to subscribe on whatever platform you listen on. All right, let's get right into this. Wissam, welcome to Startup Savant, and thank you for joining me today.

Wissam Tabbara: Hi Ethan, happy to be here!

Ethan Peyton: Stoked to have you. All right, let's jump right in. Can you give us a little bit of insight into what Truebase is and tell us the story behind the company?

Wissam Tabbara: Yeah, so I've been involved in startups for the last at least 15, 20 years of my career. And I always found myself doing three of three things, right? I'm either looking for new talent to join the team or to get and find new customers or, or investors. And I found myself most of the time on LinkedIn running like Boolean searches and clicking next for endless times.

Ethan Peyton: Hehehe.

Wissam Tabbara: Doing that over and over during the day and I wake up next day and I have to do this over and over again and asking myself the same question. How do you know this person? And it was just, I was just like blown away. I'm like, maybe, maybe I'm doing something wrong. So I went and when the time was right and I was at the point of my career when I'm looking for or thinking about what's next for me, and I went and did this customer discovery and I asked many others that were like, how do you do this or what am I doing wrong? And I discovered the answer was like similar to mine. In fact, I even found myself doing it a little bit better than the others because I'm technologists at heart. So I kind of geeked out over weekends and added my own. technology around it, like I create my own Chrome extension to speed things up and some kind of little bits like to remove those repetitive tasks. And when the time was right, that's where TrueBase was born and I wanted to really take this problem and solve it to myself and to the others as well.

Ethan Peyton: So TrueBase as a kind of concept is a solution to the customer acquisition, not necessarily customer acquisition, but prospecting of possible customers or team members or folks you could raise funds from. Is that accurate?

Wissam Tabbara: Well, today I kind of gave you how it started, but explicitly or exactly what TrueBase is and which problem it's solving in the B2B space. It's very time consuming to acquire new customers. To run a prospecting journey properly, you have to discover accounts, qualify them. and then enrich the contacts and then personalize the messages to the content and then engage with them. To do this properly, it's around 10 minutes per lead. There are teams that are tasked to do 10,000 leads. So to do that properly is very time-consuming. It's a human-bound process. And to make this worse, it's usually done by SDRs or inside sales kind of positions.

Ethan Peyton: Can you tell us what an SDR is real quick?

Wissam Tabbara: Yeah, it's a sales development representative. Yeah. So they basically the, the team and the sales organization required to acquire new customers. They are the top of the funnel in a B2B space. So they want to go and find new customers, but they don't want to like just kind of build a massive list because it has consequences, right? Your sender reputation get hindered or you start engaging into conversation that you don't want to be part of. So that's why it's common practice for the savvy teams to qualify a lot in advance and make sure they're having the right conversations. Having the right conversations is really a big part growing the business properly. 

So if you're in B2B space, it's a human-bound process. You have to hire more, even if you have the unlimited resources. Now the talent that you hire to discover those new customers. They're mostly entry level positions because usually you hire this team so they can or they get hired in this position because they want to grow in a revenue organization. So they only last on the job, little bit more than a year, but it takes four months to ramp them up and hire them in the process. So from economic…

Ethan Peyton: If you don't mind me jumping in again. 

Wissam Tabbara: Yeah.

Ethan Peyton: Why did these folks only last for a year?

Wissam Tabbara: Because it's a very tedious work and it's usually done on more teams that are mostly junior, like because that's kind of the entry level. And therefore the economics that's set up for this position, it's kind of appropriate as well because it's junior position. So what do they want to do? This is kind of where they start, they build the industry experience. This is a foot in the industry. they start getting the experience. Now they can move up the stack, if you wanna think about it, to become an account executive or sales executive. And in the revenue organization, the closer you are in closing a transaction, the higher your commission. It's all commission-based at this point, or mostly commission-based. So that's why they don't last enough on the job to a little bit more than a year.

Ethan Peyton: Gotcha.

Wissam Tabbara: If you are a revenue organization growing to grow sales, it's kind of very challenging, right? So you spend four months to hire and wrap up, they only last on a year. They're spending 46 hours doing tedious work on LinkedIn, have five, 10 tabs open, emailing questions. It's really very outdated, it's very manual. That's the state of prospecting today. That's how B2B business grows. So where TrueBase comes in. It takes this whole process and really automate the majority of it with the help of generative AI. So what does that look like? So instead of you to qualify an account, you have to go research with a company website. You have to go to every page. You're usually showing up with five or 10 questions that you have to qualify the account. So Truebase already goes and scrapes the whole website for you and answers the questions right away and within split seconds, right? So that's one way we speed up a lot the qualification. Another example and writing a personalized message on one on one basis. Truebase also with the help of generative AI employs a lot of proprietary data that we have and we write you a personalized message. So imagine, Ethan, I want to send you a call. outreach. Really what I the best way if you want the gold standard for me doing my job is I will go research your LinkedIn profile, your footprint online right

Ethan Peyton: Mm-hmm.

Wissam Tabbara: and I will take my service offering and I will kind of write rewrite it in a way to best resonate with you right. That'll be the gold standard of me doing an outreach to you but that's very time-consuming so TrueBase help you do that at scale.

Ethan Peyton: Gotcha, that makes sense. And you know what? If it's not plainly obvious to either you or to the folks listening yet, I personally don't have a whole lot of experience with sales and prospecting. I've grown more on the marketing side and the product…

Wissam Tabbara: Mm-hmm.

Ethan Peyton: …side from the businesses that I've created and the positions within other businesses that I've held. So, the most experience that I have with sales is receiving those LinkedIn messages or emails. And you know, I gotta tell you what, I got one just yesterday that was like, it would have been so good. It would have really intrigued me had any of the actual data been correct.

Wissam Tabbara: Mm-hmm.

Ethan Peyton: It was amazing that it was like, hey, we see that you've been the CEO of such and such company for two years. And I'm like, wow, I haven't, I have not.

Wissam Tabbara: Hahaha

Ethan Peyton: It's... That's just inaccurate. So it seems as though, I don't know if that company was using some sort of other automated system and it just wasn't working, or if they had these junior employees that also just weren't working. But I'm hoping that through this conversation that we can kind of alleviate some of my ignorance when it comes to sales and maybe a... the go-to-market strategy as a whole.

Wissam Tabbara: Yeah, absolutely. So by the way, it's tail data. It's a huge problem in the industry. Like LinkedIn is a gold standard, but LinkedIn is not necessarily used by professionals because it just does not scale. So there's a lot of alternative solutions which have a better workflow and automation built to it, but the data is very stale. So that's another thing we really spend a lot of time at Ruby based tackling and doing real time verification of all the data to kind of avoid those awkward moments right? Like you here you are like coming in strong and heavy and you get everything wrong. How embarrassing is that? So that happened very often as well in the B2B sales process.

Ethan Peyton: Right, well it can't be that embarrassing because they did not get any sort of response. They got deleted right from my inbox, which is actually what happens to most emails overall, but hey, that's neither here nor there.

Wissam Tabbara: Right.

Ethan Peyton: So I'm hoping that my education in sales during this next period of time can really pay off for the other folks listening. And I think even, based on your knowledge and based on the level at which you've been. for doing these things and for the amount of time that you've been doing them. I think that folks that have experience in sales that maybe aren't as green as me can also get some benefit out of this. But I'm hoping that I can maybe set a scenario for you and then maybe you can kind of either tell me how you would advise. advise a person in this situation, or if you were yourself in this situation, how you would kind of move forward. Does that sound okay to you?

Wissam Tabbara: Yeah, let's do it.

Ethan Peyton: All right, cool. So here's a scenario. I am an early stage founder of a B2B SaaS company. We've recently released an MVP, and we have signed one customer based on a personal relationship. It was somebody that we knew in the industry. Currently we are bootstrapped, but we do have a small, kind of like friends and family investment that is giving us the funds to move forward. And I'm willing to raise a seed round, but I would also consider staying bootstrapped if that made sense. So I'm not necessarily thinking one way or the other, but both are options. So at this point, I believe that I'm ready to start bringing on new customers. So how would you advise me as this founder? to move forward from here, or do you feel like there's other information that you would need to know before you could move forward?

Wissam Tabbara: Yeah, great, great use case or great scenario, very common. And we can spend maybe the whole podcast here talking about it. Right.

Ethan Peyton: Let's do it.

Wissam Tabbara: But I'm going to, so, so the, um, One important thing in startups is to be aware at the stage of the company and what's the next milestone. And you have options and you have choices. And sometimes you need to have an ABC plan, right? So one visual I will give you to make this happen. Usually you raise, when you raise, you're usually raising for an 18 to 24 month runway. but you have to be aware what is the next story you wanna tell. So at this stage, in this scenario you're describing, assume they just raised, okay, and it's common to first you reach to the network and somebody takes a bet on you, either by funding you or by using your product. And that's also common. But what is the story you wanna tell? And a common visual I will give you here, it will be like if you write your pitch deck that you want to use in the next 18 months. What is it? That kind of in a way it's an artifact to describe what is the story you want to tell. In that pitch deck, you're going to have usually a traction slide. And in that traction slide. What store you want to tell? And you have options here. Do you want to tell I generated a lot of revenue? Or do you want to tell I have a lot of daily users engagement? People are logging in using my app nonstop.

Ethan Peyton: Mm-hmm.

Wissam Tabbara: Or do you want to tell I signed up a lot more customers? All of those have different execution plan that's going to impact your everyday decision. right so staying focused and being aware where you are today and where you want to go it's critical to really answer that question in the right way right and now okay well if that's your next milestone okay um why is that milestone important because you want to raise maybe from VCs if you're raised from VCs if you're raised from angels that's also a different If you want to bootstrap this, the whole thing on your own, and…

Ethan Peyton: Mm-hmm.

Wissam Tabbara: …that is your preferred option, then that also impact your everyday decision. Maybe you want to grow a little bit more lean, manage your burn rate, grow slowly and go from there. More variation, and I'm almost like not giving you the answer, I'm complicating, but I think that's a good mental exercise for all of us

Ethan Peyton: Yeah,

Wissam Tabbara: to go through.

Ethan Peyton: and that's exactly what this is. Business is not straightforward. There's never just one answer. It's always, here's a buffet of things that you can do. Let's talk about each one of them and move forward.

Wissam Tabbara: Exactly.

Ethan Peyton: Obviously, in this particular situation, we're just going to have to pick one and move forward with it. So if you were in this position, which direction do you believe would be what you would want to take?

Wissam Tabbara: Yeah, so the one we opted in, and that was actually the second part of the variation, is to know what market you're in. All right, so what's the dynamic of the market? So TrueBase today is tackling an established market. If you go and part of our customer discovery, and we did like a lot of those conversations with potential customers, they're happy what they have. They're paying top money on it. and this industry has been established. There is no new competence in the market. Everybody is very established and we are kind of more or less penetrating this market that's already been established. So time is not the essence. Having a better value proposition is way more important. So for us in this case we raise from We are the reputable angels, executive or operators in enterprise. And we kept this team small and lean. So it would give us more iterate and iterate until we really find the right value proposition of the product and the right way to take it to market. So unlike, I'll give you this, so that's one aspect of it. That's what worked for us. Might not work for you. I'll give you another different example of a company actually I'm advising, that they are building a large infrastructure play. Think of another AWS, right? Where it takes a lot of time to build this product. There is new technology and behavioral things that took place that they want to capture on. So the play is different. The play is raise as much as you can, as fast as you can and get land grab, right?

Ethan Peyton: Right.

Wissam Tabbara: So that's a little bit of a different one. Each, like knowing what are you after, what market and what dynamic and how do you fit in, will also dictate what kind of is your next goal to really make this happen.

Ethan Peyton: Okay, so then let me maybe put a clarifier on what this company is and what this company does. So we are Flugendorferl, that's the name of our company, and we help business owners and founders to make better decisions by giving you this piece of software that helps you make better decisions. You're catching me on the back foot here, so we're building this pitch as we go. So that is kind of the product and the use case that this company has. Old, good old Flufendorffle.

Wissam Tabbara: Okay, so they have a product that I will not even attempt to say the name of the company here, but I will just take it for…

Ethan Peyton: That's okay.

Wissam Tabbara: Let’s call it The Company. Is it leveraging, is it an established market? Or is it basically a new market that's opening up?

Ethan Peyton: Customer wise, it's let's say small business owners and people that are digitally forward so they are used to spending their days online. I'm not sure, does that answer your question?

Wissam Tabbara: Yeah, I guess another way is this solving a new market in a new way or is it solving something for an existing…

Ethan Peyton: Hmm.

Wissam Tabbara: …market in a better way, right? 

Ethan Peyton: It is solving for an existing market in a better way.

Wissam Tabbara: Right, so it's more an established market. This is where TrueBase fits, right? And at this case, I'll be the most... most of the focus is I always... I almost dumb it down or be like you have two... you have two area to focus on. inside the building or outside the building, right? Inside the building, that's product, that's research, that's really refining how to build better value proposition, right? Or outside the building is like now the focus is all about to take it to market. Initially, I would expect that the early stage of the startup is spending a lot of time refining product, understanding the gaps, understanding how basically they can solve existing problems. So I'll tell you, give an example, Figma, and you're familiar with Figma as a product design product, came to an established market and they built an amazing product, right, that people love. But they were not, they were maybe very little new from technology perspective. Adobe was very well established and loved by many. Yet they came in. They took their time. If you go follow Figma, how long it took until to where they are right now, they are almost a default tool for product designer.

Ethan Peyton: Mm-hmm.

Wissam Tabbara: That was more an established market, right? Where if you think more about some other areas of emerged technology, right? Like... VR, drones, and all these kind of new things that might open up new solutions that were not available. That's more like a new market, a new way of doing things. So in your specific example, I will say make sure you have to have the best product, best value proposition. I will pay a lot less attention on product, sorry, on competition.

Ethan Peyton: Mm-hmm.

Wissam Tabbara: A big mistake I've seen is where people become so obsessed with competition. that they almost lose sight on the problem they're trying to solve.

Ethan Peyton: Interesting.

Wissam Tabbara: So I think getting a creative approach, there is no shortcut. You really have to go through the process, understand the pain points you're solving and solve it in your own way. You have to be aware of competitors, but you really have to take a fresh new approach to solve this problem. And that's actually a little bit of what we're doing at Truebase today.

Ethan Peyton: All right, so I am focused on product. I'm not focused on competition. So let's talk about this kind of go-to-market strategy or sales strategy that I would need to kind of take on from this point. I've got that one customer, and I think I want to grow. I think our product is to the point where it will be accepted by a wide market. I think that it is of good enough quality that it will be interesting to hear on the other end of a phone call or whatever. So what do I do from here?

Wissam Tabbara: Yeah, so there's also many things to touch on in the last sentence you said. Okay. Like, first of all, it's not a serialized process. So it's not you build product, then you figure out go to market because the most precious thing in a startup is your time. Right. So to develop a go-to market, you need, most people think you need the product, which is not necessarily true. And if you do that, let's say it takes you a year to build a product and now you figure out how to get to go to market and you start thinking about it right now, you're most probably way too late. All right, you don't you don't have enough time to really Take the company to the next level. So what usually you want While you're building the product you're running many experiments Okay to really figure out each piece of the puzzle. So give you an example Why are you building the product? You might have multiple hypothesis, right? So you might create the landing page Let's say and have the whole value proposition and ask people to sign up for a waitlist, right?

Ethan Peyton: Mm-hmm.

Wissam Tabbara: So there's a lot of things you can do to discover, be like, well, is this a good way for me to acquire customers? And now you start driving everybody to the to even click or view or maybe even watch a video. So you can start building and refining your messaging, your which channel you want to pick, because there is like around 20 channels. Some of them might work the best for you, some of them might not. So that has to be in parallel. most people underestimate the go-to-market and most companies or most startups fail not because they fail to build the best product is because they fail to take their product to market it's actually they think they need to have the A plus product to…

Ethan Peyton: Mm-hmm.

Wissam Tabbara: …really go but if you have an A plus go to market and a B plus product that's a way better place to be than having like the other way around. So that's one thing I wanna kind of make it clear from the get-go.

Ethan Peyton: I think that's a really strong piece of advice is that maybe, obviously we can't lose sight of product and we can't lose sight of competition, but maybe what we should truly be focused on is building that go-to-market strategy. So then take me back to what actions that I would wanna take to start building up the customer base and getting more people signed up for this product.

Wissam Tabbara: Yeah, so can I assume that you have the product in a good place and now what's next is this kind of the question or how to build or what do we need to do to lead to the product? This is more of a clarification question for you.

Ethan Peyton: I think yeah, no, that's a good question. I think we should assume that the product is, let's call it A minus. I know you said a B plus product is good enough as long as we've got a good go-to-market strategy, but you know what, I'm pretty confident. Let's say it's an A minus product.

Wissam Tabbara: So now another pitfall, if you want to think about it, and because I'm going to build on what you said, I had a friendly customer, right? The most, I guess, I almost want to say it's a blessing and it's a curse, is you get a friendly customer that pays you a lot of money. yet it's not your scalable go-to market. So it's almost anything they tell you is tainted, right?

Ethan Peyton: Interesting. Okay.

Wissam Tabbara: And I'll give you an example of that. At Azuqwa, my previous company, we signed a very large millions of dollars at an early stage company for an enterprise, like some Fortune 50 client, okay? Because we had personal relationship with them. Everything they ask us, was very custom to the specific enterprise when we were selling to completely different markets. So it complicated the product. It really, and quite honestly, they didn't end up using it. Like we had a great dollar sign on our revenue, but the engagement was very poor. So that's why it goes building a business as product and go-to-market. So who is your go-to-market has market in it, right? Or who is…

Ethan Peyton: Mm-hmm.

Wissam Tabbara: …your target market? That's what you really need to be very focused on in serving. And you really need to serve 80%. The 80-20 here is very relevant, right? So that's kind of where you have to be really aware that this is my target market and focus all your backlog and prioritization on what does that go to market telling you, right? And that should really tell you on how to, what product you should keep improving and building.

Ethan Peyton: Okay, all right, so there's, I think what I'm hearing is that almost everything kind of leads back to product. And so what it sounds like is I need to get, you know, I need to understand who I'm selling to, obviously, and I need to understand that just because I have this first customer who was a friend of mine or a college roommate or whatever. He is not my ideal customer profile, but he's paying me money, so I like having him here. 

And so, I'm getting the feedback, I'm taking that, I'm putting all that back into product. Let's talk, let's talk. Let's talk sales. What is the step that I need to take? If I, you know, I am right now a, you know, the single founder, I've got a team, we're run pretty lean, but I have traditionally been the one, you know, salesperson for this company because I know the company the best and most of the other folks that work with me are either marketing or development. So let's talk sales. Do I, should I? How do I know when I should build a sales team? Or is a sales team always necessary?

Wissam Tabbara: Yeah. So just, I want to clarify one thing on what you said is that I'm not suggesting do everything product. In fact, I'm suggesting it really needs to go, you need to build the business and it's side by side. Go to market, feed product, product feed, go to market.

Ethan Peyton: Mm-hmm.

Wissam Tabbara: So now to answer your question about when do you do sales? I am a big believer that There's basically two stages in the product or in the go-to market. There are, and the initial stage of figuring out how to sell, that's gotta be a founder role. That cannot be outsourced. And I understand does not scale. In fact, I'll say, you know, like there's a comment saying, I think Paul Graham said it from YC said, do things that do not scale. Right. And, and, and that's a very nice forcing function for you to. To figure things out because that's gonna again, go back to product, go back to the culture, go back to which market in, and this, there's a lot to figure out here that you really want to eliminate all these like different people. conversation that's why it could be all embraced within the founder. So once things become repetitive boring the same that's actually usually a good time to start bringing people to delegate and train and so they can now figure out the next bottleneck in the business. So sales is one of them I'll say start doing those calls even though it might feel a little bit painful. out the pricing, figure out the customer telling you the pain points, rally that back to the team. That's all very, very critical work to build a business.

Ethan Peyton: So me as the founder, even though I may not be classically trained in sales, it is better for me to kind of operate as that salesperson. Even if I have budget to hire someone who is experienced in sales, it sounds like it makes more sense for me to run the sales until it becomes kind of systematized before I start hiring people to kind of run that system. Am I hearing that right?

Wissam Tabbara: 100%. So I'll say it also, I'm going to emphasize on this again, is that you are basically, allow me to say that Ethan. So what is a startup? Okay. Startup is a temporary organization looking for a product market fit. That's a definition of Steve Black. Okay. So, and they tell you like or Steve Blank tells you like once you figure out the product market fit congratulations you graduated right now pour as much money on it and you'll have predictable outcome and that you can refine over time okay so going back to your to your question here founders are the best to drive to product market fit okay if you want to start scale before product market fit, which usually means you're bringing sales team, marketing at scale, right? That means you do have product market fit. If you don't, then you have a leaky bucket, right? So you're adding more to it. It becomes harder and harder to pivot, to adjust when you have a lot of sales and marketing, because guess what? You might have hired the best person who can do B2B sales in certain vertical.

Ethan Peyton: Mm-hmm.

Wissam Tabbara: You spend like four... Four months hiring them, they left their job, you're paying them a lot of money. But then you just figure it out like, you know, that was not the right focus. Maybe you want to do product lead growth. Maybe you want to do focus on a different vertical. And now what do you do? Right. So you're in a little bit different position. So you're better off. closing the gaps, figuring out the product market fit. Once you do, then now hire absolutely hire every salesperson and every marketer that you can find to really take this product to market at scale.

Ethan Peyton: So then maybe another question that comes from that is, if I'm not that super experienced salesperson, but I still am the best to lead this charge to product market fit, what happens when I get to what I think, I mean, I suppose that maybe product market fit, based on some other things that I've heard from other founders is you'll know when you have it. But how do I know that the kind of go-to-market strategy that I have created, even though I'm seeing it work, how do I know that is the one that works best? And how do I know that had I not hired that super experienced salesperson, they would have brought on some new idea that would have had us running at two or three times the level that we're running now.

Wissam Tabbara: All right. That's always a question on the founder mind and let me kind of break it to you in a second here out of the 20 Things you need to do as a founder, right? You might be Experienced or the best in one or two things maybe right? So you have to figure out a lot of things out and like I can't tell you how much Some of the stuff I have to do. I have no idea where it is, but I have to go figure it out, right? So that's always in the back of the mind of any founder But it's also with time develop the attitude, right, to just kind of go and tackle the other unknowns and unknowns and you have to go kind of figure this out and you build almost a process of it. It's either you go and you Google, you talk to other people, you whatever you need to do to quickly figure it out. 

So go to market is no different and I think the idea here is not to we figure out the go to market and this is it but we put it in a good place where we have one optimal channel that's working or kind of working, right? And even enterprise businesses are even in public right now, they're still iterating over their go-to-market and messaging, this is a continuous process of running a business. But have you figured out enough? And I always give the analogy of that, like it's almost think you have a faucet. You want at the beginning have few drops coming out of it and that's actually amazing All right And you soon want to have that like little bit of water stream coming out and then somebody will come and open all the faucet That might not be you but at least you figure out early how to get water out of the faucet That's kind of one way to think about it

Ethan Peyton: That makes sense to me. Yeah, and it seems like maybe, you know, I was even just right then, as I was thinking, I was kind of getting caught in that what if. And that's, you know, that's a dangerous area to spend a lot of time in because you can live there forever and just spin your wheels.

Wissam Tabbara: Right, right,

Ethan Peyton: So, all right, I want…

Wissam Tabbara: But also, sorry, just one more point. Think of the other side, right? You as a founder, even though you're not the most experienced in one channel, you can also, the advantage you have, is you can quickly jump from one to another, right? Unlike a specialist that are not able to do that, you are more equipped as a founder because you build the stamina to figure out the unknowns and unknowns to really quickly change course and make this happen.

Ethan Peyton: That makes sense. All right, I wanna jump to another subject, and this is just something I'd love to get your thoughts on since you are a multiple time founder, you've had a couple of different exits, you seem to be firing on all cylinders and making things work. So I was chatting recently with another founder, and he was also a multiple time founder, and he essentially was telling me that he could make any business work, and for those on just audio, I'm... quotationing…

Wissam Tabbara: Hehehehe

Ethan Peyton: …I'm tossing those quote fingers everywhere, that he could make any business work. And I don't think that he really meant truly any business. I don't think that he was saying he could sell ice cream to Martians. But what I think he was trying to get at was that as he moved through the different businesses that he operated, he had developed some sort of skill or knowledge that would... essentially be relevant in any business, and that using that skill or knowledge that he could kind of, you know, he could move any business towards success quicker and be a little bit more buffeted against, you know, failing for, you know, kind of any reason. And, you know, I've kind of felt a similar experience after I sold my first business. Like, maybe there was some sort of like unlock that would make any new business that I started next, more likely to be successful. And so…

Wissam Tabbara: Mm-hmm.

Ethan Peyton: …I wanna hear your thoughts based on your experience. Do you think that this is something that all founders develop, or do you think that this guy was special? And if it is true, what is it that we're learning through this experience?

Wissam Tabbara: Yeah, that's interesting. You gave me a lot to think about here,

Ethan Peyton: Ha ha.

Wissam Tabbara: but I'll start by saying a few things on this. First of all, every startup is a new beast.

Ethan Peyton: Yes.

Wissam Tabbara: I think it's, I have not witnessed that I showed up and I know exactly what to do. And I think you're right in the way that I have built skills. to maybe deal with some uncertainty and to how to overcome. And there's definitely patterns that I draw from heavily. So that's just one thing to put out there. But it's also, there are things in your control. There are things that are not in your control. Market dynamics, how things are moving. Like think of the generative AI right now, how fast it's moving, how fast it's evolving. What does that mean? And there's a lot like this is always a space this is always and to make things worse and now we have a downturn economy like Those are macro changes that are happening right now that any business is going through that has impact on fundraising. There are massive layoffs taking place which is really increasing the talent pool and the skills that are out in the market. So that's a lot to deal with here, right? Have I seen this before? Maybe not exactly, but I can tell you like at least in 2008 and my previous startups informed, economy. Now it happened that maybe I've seen some of this before and trying to apply it, but I think you almost develop, which brings me kind of really to the most successful thing you can do to set up a startup, is to build this operating system. It's really the culture and the values that you adhere to. And that's what most first-time entrepreneurs skip.

Ethan Peyton: Okay.

Wissam Tabbara: Think of like what are the values of the company? How do you make decisions? What do you, what's important to you? What's not important to you? What are the things you want to do? How do you want to do it? For example, transparency, decision-making, that's data-driven, right? So Amazon is very well known with the 14 leadership principle. So we kind of took that, we, and those are basically stay with me over the years, and I have the chance to refine them from my learnings. That does come with me. It follows me all the time, and I spent a lot of time hiring a team that really fits well with this value. So those are learnings that are, if you wanna say, those are critical to build any successful business. So from that perspective, I think experience, yeah, is helpful. I think we, with TrueBase, we weathered so far COVID. we weathered blockchain collapsing or back in the days, because I didn't tell you that, but we were part of that space. And that was all came from learnings over the years. So it does help to really know that. And the other thing that most startup founders or first time entrepreneurs really dive a little bit too fast into the startup world. And I have mixed opinions on that because In a way, in a typical career, where usually people start sometimes big tech, sometimes small tech, you almost have one chance to get a startup going.

Ethan Peyton: Mm-hmm.

Wissam Tabbara: Like how many, if you're 25 years old or 35 years old, you might be going to take a year or two off, no salary. Not a lot of people can do that many times in their career, especially if they haven't had enough success at the beginning. So you really want to plan that very carefully. And one of the best way to prepare to that is to join a startup as a founding member or in the early stage. Because yes, you take a salary cut, you have some upside. And one of the best thing you can learn from that experience is not to exactly what to do in your next startup, but exactly what to not do in your next startup. And that's sometimes where most of the learning is.

Ethan Peyton: Yeah, that really makes sense to me as I was kind of like, as I was trying to think about what, you know, kind of what this felt like or what these learnings were or this kind of unquantifiable, let's call it just experience is, was, you know, just like what you said, instead of knowing what to do, you kind of know what not to do. And that was, I wrote down better prioritization. and that kind of sounds like it's pretty similar. I really like your concept of you developing and understanding these values to live by. And I think that you're also just kind of building confidence as well in that, hey, you know, I've done this before, and that again, kind of is a little bit unquantifiable, or at least hard to articulate. And so I... Maybe the question as I initially posed it was flawed in thinking that there was one thing, but maybe it is kind of all of these unquantifiable things that they're not necessarily front of mind, but they're all these things that live kind of back of mind that just accumulate over time and permeate through the entirety of the founder that kind of give them that ability to move. in a more effective way the next time as the first time.

Wissam Tabbara: Yeah, that's us.

Ethan Peyton: So let's move on to the question that I love asking the most. And I think this is really going to be good because I think we've both got our big time thinking wheels spinning here. So let me ask you, what is your number one piece of advice for early stage entrepreneurs?

Wissam Tabbara: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I will say kind of start with the problem, okay? And I will say, you have to assume, by the way, start with the problem because the reason why I say that is because most people start with the solution. And they end up to be a solution looking for problem. So, my advice would be start with the problem and be very flexible with the solution.

Ethan Peyton: All right, so 80 mile per hour wins too. I don't, woo, okay. Let's try to wrap this up. All right, so thank you for that advice. I think that's really good advice. Can you tell us what is next for Truebase?

Wissam Tabbara: Well, you know, this is my first startup and. I heard this from other entrepreneurs who have done this before, but they say every now and then you land into a big problem where you have stars aligned and you have everything you need to make this happen. And I feel this is where I am with TrueBase. We really landed on a big problem and I think we have a front seat on the new generation of how we're solving it. So we're approaching more and more product market fit from what we've seen. So at this point, we are all about going to the next level and putting this in the hand of more and more people and growing the company and taking the next step.

Ethan Peyton: Last question, where can people connect with you online and how can our listeners support TrueBase?

Wissam Tabbara: Well, the best way to connect with me is on LinkedIn. It's my first name, W-I-S-S-A-M, last name T-A-B-B-A-R-A. Also if you go to truebase.io, so that's true and base.io, there's an about us page and there's all the links about all my social media and how you can find me. The best way to support us I think is to, if you are in the B2B space, play with the product and give us feedback and if you like it, let everybody else know about it. So that's kind of what we are all about and that's the best way to support us.

Ethan Peyton: Awesome. Wissam, thank you so much for coming on the show. Folks, if you're looking for anything that we talked about today, all the links, all the stuff, find that over on StartupSavant.com slash podcast. And Wissam, I love the way you think, so I want to give you the last word.

Wissam Tabbara: Well, this has been a lot of fun and I think the startup journey is a very exciting one, but it's also not for everyone. I think you have to really plan the next step. And if this is something you want to pursue, you have to prepare for it as much as you can. Because as I mentioned, most people have only one shot. And if this is what you want to do and this is the right fit for you, I think it could be very rewarding. It was rewarding for me and it was very satisfying. And good luck to you.

Ethan Peyton: All right, thank you so much.