Fran is a 3x Sales Leader, GTM Advisor, and first-time founder of his company, Hark - a CX channel that allows for brands and their consumers to better communicate for anything post-purchase.
Fran is a 3x Sales Leader, GTM Advisor, and first-time founder of his company, Hark - a CX channel that allows for brands and their consumers to better communicate for anything post-purchase.
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Hatchet Ventures website: www.hatchetventures.com
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Chet Lovegren’s LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/chetlovegren/
Fran Brzyski’s LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/fbrzyski/
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Narrator: 1, 2, 3, 4. Are you a founder, co-founder, aspiring entrepreneur, or just someone who loves to hear about how companies are built? Then join us as we talk with founders and CEOs who have been there and done that.
Welcome to the Founder's Formula Podcast. Sponsored by Hatchet Ventures. And now your host Chet Lovegren.
Chet: All right. Welcome one. Welcome all to the Founder's Formula Podcast. The show that's designed to bring you the latest and greatest stories and insights from founders worldwide, who have been there and done that. My guest today is a three time sales leader, go to market advisor, and first time founder of his company, Hark. Hark is a CX channel that allows for brands and their consumers to better communicate for anything post-purchase. Please welcome to the show. Fran Bryzski, Fran. Great to have you.
Fran: Yeah, Chet, thanks for having me, man. I hope this can be valuable for anyone listening.
Chet: I'm sure it will be. And I'm really excited to dig into a little bit more about Harkand how you founded the company and the concept from, the, the, the move from conception to inception.
But first of all, I know that everybody would be really interested to learn a little bit more about you and your story. So tell us about Fran, what's your background and what got you up to the point of founding Hark.
Fran: Yeah. A lot unpack there. I, graduated college with a finance degree, got a job at JP Morgan and thought I'd made it.
I remember how proud my mom and dad were of me. I hated that I, nine months in, I was out, I took a paid cut to go into sales. I knew that that's what excited me. I liked controlling my own destiny in that regard. And it's just what I felt like I was meant to do. So I pursued that and I worked at a financial advisory firm to start.
You can imagine that's an easy transition and then had a mentor pluck me out and take me to Stryker, which was med device selling the neurosurgeons, plastic surgeons, reconstructing the face doing tumor resections. I wasn't doing that, but I was in the room while they were people much smarter than I just constantly battled with being at a big company.
I just felt like my contributions did not move the needle substantially. I felt internally that I needed to find a way to overcome that. So I made a bold move and I left. I went to what I thought was a startup in biotech, which was Oxford Immunotec. And it was a little bit larger, but our unit was run like a startup.
And it was my first taste of that. And where your contributions could really help move the needle for a company and what that could mean for a company, and everybody rowing in the same boat together was really well managed. And I loved that. They were acquired and I came to a crossroads of what do I want to do?
Do I wanna stay in med device? People from the outside, tell you how great that is and how it should be. I didn't, I didn't love it though. I felt like it, health insurance was changing. It was dictating healthcare and I couldn't make a big impact. And I kept going back to software. Where you could get
product feedback and iterate in a sprint in a week. And have that come to market. So that fascinated me and I met somebody along my journey who worked at a company called Rocketrip and we connected and he got me an interview there. And I remember meeting recruiters along the way, telling me, you've gotta become an SDR to become an AE.
Even though I had a lot of enterprise experience and I just kept plowing through, I didn't believe that. So I worked at Rocketrip phenomenal company, phenomenal culture. The pandemic happened, we sold business travel. So I ended up leaving and going to a seed stage company where I was the first sales hire, which had to be dissolved in a short time for, for a few different reasons.
But along this journey I learned a ton of what works and what doesn't work, and I've always had that entrepreneurial itch and finally had a long conversation with my wife to say, this is time, like it's time for me to start my own company and create an environment where people could flourish.
Chet: I love that. And speaking as someone who came from similar, I didn't sell medical devices, but I was in the outside sales world knocking on doors. Seeing what that looked like and working at a bigger company. I love that then you also got that experience of working at a very small seed stage company, right?
So, you combined, those two experiences, you were able to make it, a really healthy decision for yourself, but also you had a lot of experience in that regard. I love that you held out for the AE role too. I always thought that was funny also. It's like I see people all the time. I'm like they have six, five years of professional selling experience.
Like we're gonna make, 'em sit in the SDR seat they're gonna be bored and quit in six months, you know? So even the ability to make those decisions for yourself, I'm sure are, are, really helping you along the way in terms of, being an advisor and also being a founder at Hark.
Fran: It's the SDR thing.
It's that's hard. , that's one of the hardest jobs there is. And, the skillset that I,had acquired over the time I just didn't think it lended myself like, when I come to the company and I try to add value that's not the value I'm going to bring man, is that a hard job?
But, yes. I felt look, recruiters are incentivized to try to get somebody in the seat as fast as possible. I was a little bit risky of an option. I get it. But I'm a big believer in having faith in yourself and I just pursued that.
Chet: Yeah, I love that. So, I'm curious, tell us about Hark, like, how did you was it's a, was this an itch that you had to scratch?
What does Hark really do? What do they solve for what's your ICP? Give us the rundown of Hark and then more importantly, like back that into like the story and the background behind how you decided to found this company.
Fran: Yeah. So cut me off. If I, start playing the background music, if I go on a diagram here, but great.
Yeah. Centricity was a seed stage company that I was at and I was the first sales hire. And, I had this vision in my head of scaling that organization. We were doing something so novel with customer data. It was so exciting and to see that blow up in my face was hard and it left a lot of people, in a really hard place.
So mentally I was in a bit of a fog coming out of that and I had a friend. Who sent me The Four Agreements. And I dunno if you've ever read that book, but it's an amazing short read. The Four Agreements, it's like a spirituality book a bit. And then I, he also sent me The Alchemist. So The Alchemist, if you've never read, it is all about, there's a journey to find a treasure.
And along that journey, you think you've made it to certain points, but you realize those were stepping stones to get where you ultimately have to be. And it was just, it really hit me in a certain way. Plus, I always had this itch to become an entrepreneur myself. So through a lot of self-reflecting, I reached out to somebody
I barely knew Neil Capel. He started to Sailthru, but I met him at a VC offsite when I was at Centricity. And, we just became very close for a short time. You meet somebody you stay up to 2:00 AM drinking bourbon with them and share some stories. For some reason, I reached out to him of all people and said, I have an idea and can I run it by you?
And he was like, immediately, yes, run it by me. So he's been with me since day one and I, I come from a blue collar family. Like I always had this chip on my shoulder being self-made, once I, I, I got the ego outta the way. I'm not, self-made like, you have to surround yourself with really good people who are gonna push you.
And that's what he did. I, would've never started Hark if, if he didn't instill the confidence, me confidence in me in that moment to pursue this dream that I had, and we just kept riffing on it and going about it. And then I, took the next steps and started making a landing page. Is there demand out there doing customer research?
Is this something that I think is viable and is this something that I think can make an impact? And do I also think it's something where I can go raise money and it's VC fundable? Cause I knew that was the path that I was gonna go down. I don't have the background for bootsrapping and coding.
Yeah. So I started cold calling leaders and just saying Hey, I've got this software and it could do X, Y, and Z for you. Its a vaporware it's exist. But I was trying to test that market and I met Ben who's on my board of advisors. Now he's the Director of Customer Experience at Pair Eyewear.
He was, he was blown away okay, you're looking at it from this lens. But imagine on the back end for leaders like me, we can do so much more with this. And we started developing the idea, and finally decided to go all in. Neil was the first check in to get it off the ground.
But we created a native app, got to market and said, okay, there's legs here. We're gonna go. And we're gonna raise money, the VC route. And that's just what we did.
Chet: That's awesome. I'm really you, you said you said something interesting there that I would love your thoughts on. Vaporware, right?
What is I've heard of a couple people talking about this in their founding story. What does the process look like if you get a hold of someone they're like, oh, that sounds awesome. Would love to see it. Like, how do you approach that when they're actually interested in moving forward? More importantly, like if it's a conceptual thing or an idea or something that you're working on,
what do those agreements look like to be able to determine future potential revenue, right? Yeah. How how did you run that process when you did get that person who didn't tell you no, who was like, yeah, this sounds awesome, sign me up? I'd imagine that's incredibly terrifying, but also incredibly exciting at the same time.
Fran: Yeah.
I'd lean towards exciting. These people were calling one they're human beings. They get it. And as long as you're not like, yeah you're towing that line a little bit. With Ben, when we got to that point, I just started smiling and I was like, this doesn't exist yet.
It's in beta. Here's my landing page. Here's how I'm looking at. Would love your help. Like a lot of people, a lot of good people wanna help you. So I think you just approach it the right way and you just be honest about it. That that will reciprocate and be like okay. I know where we stand now.
This sounds great. And that's just what happened. He jumped in and helped me tremendously. Like I said, he is on my board of advisors. We talk every single day. So I think you just have to, you gotta get the meeting as we know in sales. But if you come through as genuine, that shines and people wanna work with good people.
Chet: That's awesome. Now, obviously this kind of segues us into one of the questions I have, which is you've got this extensive sales and sales leadership background. Obviously in the beginning stages of Hark, being able to do that cold calling, do that outreach, generate that interest, drive some urgency was helpful from a sales perspective, but what other
things in your experience, do you feel gave you a great head, start on being the founder of Hark?
Fran: Yeah, I seeing it now and we'll get into this later. I would urge many more sales professionals to try and start a company. The foundation you have of going to market is so strong. I always leaned into the product not as much engineering, but I leaned into the product side during my like real sales days as an enterprise rep and became very close with that team.
So for example, at Rocketrip our, I don't know what his title was, but he was one of the head product people. He's now my head of product here. We kept a very close relationship and I was just always very interested of what is the roadmap? How can I impact that? Can I bring you into calls? I just feel like that accelerates all aspects of the business.
So I got in line with it there at Centricity being the first sales hire, part of the reason I wanted to do that was to learn about building from the ground floor. I attended every sprint review I attended I was commenting on RFCs and I was just very in tune with the product engineering team and had a strong hand in that.
And the leadership team was so tight knit. It was product engineering, CTO, CEO, and me. I just be became very involved with those conversations. I remember even reaching out to a former. mEntor of mine and said, look, I'm using JIRA a lot in Confluence. Should I really dive into this? And he said, yes, if you have the opportunity go in with both feet, in fact, take a course on it.
Here's where you can find one. And it propelled me to know enough now to be able to start a company and know what I know, getting Hark off the ground. I tapped into a network of engineers and product people from Nigeria that I met through my startup experience, who I had relationships with and said, do you wanna help me?
And they said yes and I knew like we wanted to build on GCP versus AWS. Like I knew foundationally what I wanted to do. Do I know if that should be on C Sharp or that should be, written in Java or Python? No, I don't know that. Yeah, but I'm, again, I'm gonna surround myself with the right people who do, and also Neil from sale through like he's a CTO at Hark.
So I had him to toss ideas by and just get his opinion on things too.
Chet: Yeah. And I think you just demystified something for a lot of aspiring founders, which is as a founder and CEO, you don't have to have all the answers. If you did, you'd be a one man show and you'd never need to hire anybody. Right.
Fran: You need to prove what you can do.
So for me, yeah, bringing an app to market that flowed the way it did and worked the way it did, I think gave investors confidence that said, okay, like this guy can do what he says. He's gonna do that's big. Like I can build, I just build in a different way versus being able to code it myself.
Chet: So that kind of brings me to my next point, which is essentially we're in this world now, where back in the day you had the Zuckerbergs of the world, right? These people that could sit there and code for 15 hours straight creating these products or services or offerings that they didn't really know how to bring to market.
And then they had to leverage a lot of outside help for that. We're seeing a lot of that flip, especially on the Founders Formula Podcast, we're meeting a lot more non-technical founders and some of their products are very extensive,some fairly simple. But being a non-technical founder and having a product like Hark that does rely on some form of integration and platform and stuff like that.
What would you say were some of the biggest challenges to spinning up the offering?
Fran: It's a great question. It's I might not be answering it directly, but it does come down to your first step as moving into this leadership role of trust. Trust and respect that the person you're working with is. Doing this the right way.
So to that point, it is very hard as a non-technical founder to interview technical people. So bringing in your circle of trust, people who are technical and can help you through that is imperative. I'm on the interview just to make sure culturally, like this is somebody that I think could add value to the company.
And I was about to say somebody that I'd wanna work with, which is a whole nother discussion. I'm a very big proponent of cultural diversity. And that's not always the person that you think you wanna work with, but is gonna add most value to your business. But bringing in those technical people to ask those questions and having trust that we're all here together and we're on this ship together and We're all trying to do the right thing.
Like I, I think that's what it gets down to. So that is the biggest challenge interviewing and making sure you're bringing on people with the right skillset. But I know I keep saying this. If you surround yourself with people that supplement your skillset, you can do that. It's just in a different way.
Chet: Yeah. And that's, that seems to be a recurring theme here. Like a lot of it is about support. Entrepreneurship might seem like a bit of a lonely road cuz you're the one with the biggest stake in the game. It's your name? It's your money? It's your livelihood. It's you know, your emotions at the end of the day, but you're bringing in a lot of people on your advisory board.
In your group, working with people through Hatchet that are really there to support and help you. And I think that's awesome. It's it's, it's good to see that you have that head on your shoulders where you're like, Hey, I'm not afraid to go get the support, again, I don't need all the answers.
I just need to know the answers that build upon the strengths that I have.
Fran: It's long enough as it is Chet. Like I, without getting too personal. I wasn't in a financial position to leave my job and start a company. In fact, I was quite the opposite. Like I've never had a massive exit where I had a lot of equity and I was set it was a conversation with my wife of here's what I want, or I think I need to do.
And her agreeing I see what you're saying. And I see that itch that you need to scratch. Yes. And we were on the same page doing that again, the support and the teamwork to do that. But. There's a little bit of crazy to it to pursue something like this in that situation. There's loneliness that way, but why would you get in your own way and try to be the master of everything where you don't need to be for me at Hark, like if I've surrounded myself with people so much smarter than I am, and if I can give them an environment where they can do their best work and be happy doing it.
And collaborating with people that they enjoy collaborating with. That is the foundation that is going to make this company accelerate to the point that it can because we're building, but things are gonna get really hard. Customers are gonna have complaints and we're gonna have to onboard and we're gonna have to hit tight deadlines.
And if we built this foundation to do it together, then it's going to go the right way. And, and that's I'm building like. Yes. Do I have a passion for Hark, which we need to get into and I'll explain what it is but, I also have a passion for people close to me that are a lot smarter than I am, who have been burned in the past.
I want to give them that opportunity to accelerate and really push themselves to see who they are.
Chet: So Fran, when I talk to a lot of founders, especially when they're in the part of the journey that you're in, they tell me that there was this moment where they had like an aha moment, right? Like where they're like, okay, this is working.
I feel good about this. All the trials and tribulations are paying off. What does that look like for you up to date in this stage? What was your aha moment where you were like, All the hard work is paying off. I feel good. Was it a customer story? Was it the funding that you've raised? Fill me in.
Fran: CX leaders and just having these conversations with them and them being so excited about this potentially coming to market and changing the way that consumers were engaging with them.
They, they, they absolutely saw the need for it. So yeah, that was enough for me to keep pursuing and saying, okay, I'm gonna build this out. But the real exciting ones were Matt Ring, who I mentioned before, came on board. And when he heard from customers for the first time, their excitement about Hark back to us and then diving in that way, like he wouldn't stop Slacking me calling me.
This is going to be so big. Like when you see the team members validate it for themselves in a different way, versus what you're telling them, it's a really magical thing. And it creates a lot of enthusiasm. An excitement. The final one was my, I have a product owner Scott in, in Lagos.
And, we hopped on a call and his first two weeks, I said, how are things going? How are you feeling with the team? And he said, this has been the best two weeks of the year. For me from a professional experience, I am so excited and happy to be here. And that was just unbelievably fulfilling just to create this space for them to thrive.
Chet: Man. You still looking for investors? I'm in it's crazy. It's like you essentially took. The customer success model and why it's viable in software. And applied that to brands so that you, their version of churn, their version of churn would essentially be, can we get a customer to buy a second time probably.
Yeah. And you essentially eliminated that, providing a better experience for them. Post-sale which is incredible. Cause I'll tell you personally, I won't name a company, but there's an insurance company that I will be a lifelong customer of because I had a, like a special policy on one of my really nice MacBooks that I had when I was doing a lot of production.
Yep. And my kids spilled orange juice on it and it stopped working, but I had a separate policy just for that equipment. And we got on a video chat with the claims handler. I didn't have to ship the things somewhere. Wait, two weeks. It was instantly like in two days it was solved. they had a check for the insured amount into my bank.
I was able to go and buy another MacBook cuz I couldn't stop producing. Yep. I'll be a lifelong customer. I don't care if they increase my car insurance every once in a while by, 10 bucks a month cuz the service that I was able to be provided when I actually needed it. When I gave them money, the commitment they made to me to be loyal and give me as much value or more value than perceived for what I paid for.
Is me a lifelong customer. So that's awesome that you've brought that to like the brand and e-commerce level. That's really cool.
Fran: Yeah. I think customers wanna feel like they're taken care of, and in a world where you can buy from five different shops, the same thing, you're gonna go to the one where you're like, okay, they've invested enough in me to take care of me.
And allow me to feel heard. I'm gonna go back there and try to buy from there the first time before I go somewhere else. Yeah, the next time I'm in the market for something. So that's a great example. Absolutely.
Chet: Yeah. I love it. So Fran as we're closing, like I would really love to hear from you and I'm sure the listeners would as well, whether they're currently going through a round of
funding or they just secured a round to funding. It's no secret. We're in a bit of an economic downturn. We're not really sure what's gonna happen over the next couple months. We're pretty sure we know what's gonna happen. We're just waiting for it to happen. What kind of advice would you give to someone since you just recently raised that 1.6 million round to someone who's either trying to secure funding or is just secured funding and is like wondering man I'm in that growth stage, what do I need to look out for? What kind of words of wisdom could you give them.
Fran: There will always be reasons to not do it. If you have that itch and you have faith in yourself, go do it. There's never been a better time. In my opinion, at least in my time here to start a company we've been through this 10 year bull market, metrics got a little bit outta whack, and now everybody's focused on the core metrics of how you should build a business the right way.
Yes, of course, growth stage companies like series Bs, C, D they're affected a lot right now. The way that they were building and scaling, but to get a company off the ground, people are still deploying a lot of capital at pre-seed. At the end of the day, they believe in you as a founder and they believe about the market for you to penetrate and create an opportunity.
There's people taking those bets every single day. The biggest advice I would give is to just be true to yourself. There's so much noise about how you have to do it this way, and you have to talk to investors like this, and you have to handle questions like that. If you get very comfortable with yourself and you come off as genuine, which you should be like, you should this is me.
And you're very confident behind that you can handle anything in stride. And when I started to get more comfortable with myself, my, my pitch changed dramatically over the months that I was in market funding, as it should. You should iterate after every single conversation. Yeah. But the more, when I was like, just throughout the deck let's talk let's talk about you as an investor.
What gets you excited? This is the market that I'm I'm penetrating here with Hark and here's what I think I can change. And here's the addressable market. Here's how, why I am the person to do that. Those conversations were the most fruitful that I had. I definitely saw a change once I stopped listening to all the outside noise and just got truth myself internally of this is how I should approach this.
Chet: That's great. And I think that's your sales background speaking, right? Like we AB test, we speak to the person and the persona. We understand what's important to them. We don't just make it a big feature dump that's right. It's essentially some pitch deck could be is just a massive feature dump about you, your company, your problem, your market, all that stuff.
Fran: These investors are gonna be in your cap table for a long time. Like you want investors that I'm ecstatic about my cap table. I brag about it to a lot of people look at the people that I have backing Hark and I can call and text and ask advice to. It's absolutely incredible. And, and it's a nice place to be, but that came from being genuine and forming those relationships to where we both felt comfortable to move forward.
Chet: Yeah. Look at Salesforce, right? They were founded right before the.com bubble and yeah, look where they're at now. Granted that's one in a million, right? There's probably plenty of companies that didn't succeed during that time.
Fran: But why not you, like, why not you, why in a million there's all kinds of stats to say don't do it.
And why not? You, like, why not have faith in yourself and say I'm gonna try it cuz Chet, at the end of the day, like even if you don't succeed in that way, you were gonna succeed by opening up your network, pushing yourself and getting so uncomfortable, being comfort. You will personally and professionally be a different person in a good way on the outside of this, where you'll be in a better place than you were.
Chet: I love it. I love it. Fran awesome stuff, man. If we had another half an hour, I'm sure we could definitely fill the time and you have so much great knowledge and I really want to thank you for stopping by the podcast and sharing. Not only just your story. But your insights as well. Especially in the climate that we're in, please plug yourself, plug Hark, where can we connect with you?
Where can we connect with Hark? If any of our listeners are interested in evaluating the product or even just getting in touch with you? I know you're a founder, so you probably don't respond to all DMs. But if anybody's interested in any way in connecting with you or your company how can we do that.
Fran: Yeah. The, the website's www.sendhark.com. Very, very easy. LinkedIn it's linkedin.com/fbryzski. Just go to Hark's. My, my last name B R Z Y S K I it's Polish go to Hark's, LinkedIn and you'll find me as an employee there. Definitely reach out to my, my DMs. Look, I've had so many people help me along the.
If I can help in any possible way, I respond to all of those and I'm eager to jump on a call and if I can't help you, I'm gonna try to find the person that can so please, please reach out.
Chet: Yeah. And we'll have all that information in the show notes below. Great. The website. Fran's LinkedIn page, all that good stuff.
So you'll be able to access that there. Fran, I really appreciate you stopping by today's episode. I know our listeners got a lot of value out of it. If you're interested in connecting further with the Founders Formula Podcast or Hatchet Ventures, please check out the website and information in the show notes.
And until then we'll see you on the next one. Thanks Fran.
Fran: Thanks. Thanks for having me Chet.