Valley Manifesto:

Chapter 1: What We Have Learned

Valley was one of the first AI SDR products to hit the market and the first to focus on LinkedIn as a channel. We grew from $0 to $500k ARR in a few months. A feat very few seed stage companies achieve. We raised $3.2M from some of the best investors in the world: General Catalyst, Antler, Jason Calacanis, Transform VC, ID8, the CEO of Ticketmaster, Evite, and Match. We built a world class team and brought on industry shaping advisors including the CRO of Brex, VP of Sales at Front, Miro, Rippling, Datadog, Zoom, and more.

When we began building in March 2023 - two things were true:

  1. There existed three ways to book appointments: SDRs (expensive and low retention employees), Agencies (expensive and 90% don’t work), and founder led prospecting which, inherently, had no potential to scale.
  2. In each of those three categories - the work being done was repetitive, laborious, tedious, and manual muck that no one wanted to do. Not even SDRs wanted to do it… the role was just a stepping stone to a more forward facing role like AE or in some cases CSM

These truths presented a clear problem to solve - an intense & frequent problem - a large marker - and an obvious founding sales narrative - you combine those pieces and you have a business.

What Is Still True?

All of it.

Finding an intense, and frequent problem to solve with a clear technical shift which allows for a 10x productivity boost and a 10x cost reduction is a generation defining opportunity & these market conditions have not shifted.

What Changed?

There are two layers that we learned have shifted.

  1. Finding PMF in a post AI world
  2. Product requirements for AI tools in a pre AI world are very different than the product requirement for AI in a post AI world

When building a startup - founders will often refer back to an idea called “crossing the chasm”. This concept outlines how technology is adopted by consumers. You have 5 categories of buyers:

  1. Innovators
  2. Early Adopters
  3. Early Majority
  4. Late Majority
  5. Laggards