Despite Drift's massive success, co-founder Elias Torres reflects that the product was ultimately "shallow." It excelled at the first customer connection (lead capture) but failed to carry that context through the entire customer journey. This created a fragmented experience and limited its depth, a key learning for his new company, Agency.
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Before launch, product leaders must ask if their AI offering is a true product or just a feature. Slapping an AI label on a tool that automates a minor part of a larger workflow is a gimmick. It will fail unless it solves a core, high-friction problem for the customer in its entirety.
When growth stalls, the default is often to chase more top-of-funnel leads. Instead, founders should first focus on optimizing their existing funnel through lifecycle marketing and better converting the leads they already have.
Startups often fail to displace incumbents because they become successful 'point solutions' and get acquired. The harder path to a much larger outcome is to build the entire integrated stack from the start, but initially serve a simpler, down-market customer segment before moving up.
Scribe started by building workflow automation, viewing documentation as a simple byproduct. Customers, however, found the automation only incrementally valuable but saw the documentation as a game-changing solution. Listening to this strong user pull led to the company's successful pivot.
The go-to-market tool market is fragmented because sales tactics have a short shelf life, quickly rendering point solutions obsolete. The future belongs to integrated platforms that act as an "IDE" (Integrated Development Environment), allowing teams to rapidly experiment, iterate, and execute new GTM strategies.
The traditional SaaS method of asking customers what they want doesn't work for AI because customers can't imagine what's possible with the technology's "jagged" capabilities. Instead, teams must start with a deep, technology-first understanding of the models and then map that back to customer problems.
Having paying customers doesn't automatically mean you have strong product-market fit. The founder warns against this self-deception, describing their early traction as a "partial vacuum"—good enough to survive, but not to thrive. Being "ruthlessly honest" about this gap is critical for making necessary, company-defining pivots.
As Drift grew to thousands of customers and hundreds of employees, Elias Torres found his time consumed by managing people, not talking to customers. He intimately felt the pain of losing that direct connection, realizing that by the time a CSM flags a churn risk, it's often too late. This pain directly inspired his next company.