The following interview is a conversation we had with Spencer Dusebout, CEO & Founder of Aidium, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $19 Million Raised to Build the Future of Mortgage CRM
Brett
Welcome to Category Visionaries, the show dedicated to exploring exciting visions for the future from the founders who are on the front lines building it. In each episode, we’ll speak with a visionary Founder who’s building a new category or reimagining an existing one. We’ll learn about the problem they solve, how their technology works, and unpack their vision for the future. I’m your host, Brett Stapper, CEO of Front Lines Media. Now let’s dive right in today’s episode. Hey, everyone, and welcome back to Category Visionaries. Today we’re speaking with Spencer Dusebout, CEO and Founder of Aidium, a CRM platform for mortgage professionals that’s raised 19 million in funding. Spencer, how are you?
Spencer Dusebout
I’m doing great. Yeah. Thanks for having me on, Brett.
Brett
Not a problem. Super excited. Let’s jump right in. What are you building today?
Spencer Dusebout
We are building an end to end solution for really property tech, but focus particularly on mortgage. So the minute that there’s a lead to the transaction phase to kind of client retention, working with borrowers again and again. So that’s the solution that we brought to market and are continuing to additional data layers on that to make it more useful for our customer base.
Brett
Now take us back to the founding of the company in 2019. How did you uncover this problem? Were you in the mortgage space or were you just looking for opportunities and problems to solve and uncover this problem?
Spencer Dusebout
I had done a startup before. Well, I have done a number of things, and we’ll kind of skip over all of the failures where I ran into brick walls and did when that actually worked, which was doing predictive data in the real estate space. So were predicting when people be more likely to sell their homes and then selling those leads to realtors and so got a good glimpse of what goes into a real estate transaction, the tech that’s involved, or lack thereof, in this particular case, and just really was able to see that mortgage lenders are 99.9% of cases really the quarterback of a transaction and no ones really on the same page. And the lack of technology that was being used and understood that there was an opportunity to bring something into that market to help streamline that process.
Spencer Dusebout
And of course, we’ve iterated many times. But initially that was just my glimpse. Theres not a lot of great technology here and people are not on the same page as to whats going on. So lets try to find a way to help address that.
Brett
Trey, why do you think this market is so underserved?
Spencer Dusebout
Trey its a few reasons. I think the first reason is there’s a lot of legacy software players that are extremely sticky, if you will. And in any industry with a lot of legacy software, it’s hard to kind of figure out the right way to be disruptive in that and sort of strike a chord where people are willing to adopt something. And so I think there’s that. I think there are significant barriers to entry sort of on the compliance side. And these are things that I kind of found out as we started building. But dealing with banks, a lot of sensitive information, and so it takes some serious resources to get integrated into these core systems that these banks have and to get through their compliance. And so I think there’s some pretty significant barriers.
Spencer Dusebout
But I also just think that people really haven’t cracked the code on how they can kind of guess best get into the space and add value.
Brett
When we look at the competitive landscape, who are those competitors? Is it more general purpose tools like Salesforce or their industry specific tools? Are those like the legacy players are talking about that are serving the industry and they’re just old?
Spencer Dusebout
Yeah, so there’s different categories in this particular vertical. You know, I think the interesting dynamic about mortgage, but also this is true for sort of real estate title insurance, which we dabble in as well, is you have a distributed sales team that has a lot of leverage. So if you think about a loan officer or a realtor, they’re generating their own book of business, in essence. And that might be from referral sources, that might be they have their own lead gen funnels. But really, like when you think about a mortgage loan officer at a bank, the bank isn’t providing them with leads. Typically they’re going out and sourcing that. And so they have a lot of leverage in the sense where if they say, hey, look, I really like this tech platform, I want to bring it in and use it.
Spencer Dusebout
Bank says no, they’ll just say, all right, fine, well, I’ll just go down the street to another bank because it turns out there’s a lot of banks that can do mortgages and underwrite it. And so I think so it’s very fragmented in that sense where you have sort of the needs of the enterprise, which might be a marketing director, might be ahead of production, which is the mortgage equivalent, head of sales. You have your compliance, your technology, and then you have the loan officer. And within that category, you have some loan officers that have been the business a lot of years that use excel on sticky notes, and then you have some that are more open to technology and you have others that are somewhere in between.
Spencer Dusebout
And so there’s a lot of different Personas there and there’s different technology solutions that sort of serve all the above. Like there’s vertical specific solutions that address marketing or others that, you know, maybe address the needs of the originator that is used to using Excel or there are also, you know, systems and a sister to where we started. We, I think we kind of tackled the hardest problem. First went to market is serving the needs of the top producer and really putting something in their hands that’s integrated to all their core systems. It’s very flexible, customizable, and also easy to use, easy to adopt. And so, you know, kind of looking at the competitive landscape, there are different players that kind of scratch the itch at different Personas, but there’s not really one that brings it all together and that’s us.
Spencer Dusebout
As far as like the salesforce kind of solution, I think we’re sort of, obviously we’re startups. I hate to say like we’re a gay study about it, but like, I think we definitely are an example of where our vertical is an example of something where Salesforce has been largely very ineffective in serving. And the reason for that is it’s just extraordinarily expensive to integrate everything into salesforce, integrate things on top of it to get kind of the marketing juice and then it’s just something again that your loan officers primarily don’t use. And so we worked with a number of companies that, let’s say they spent 20 million on a Salesforce build. Nobody uses it and we end up just coming in and replacing it in essence, obviously at a pennies on the dollar in terms of getting up and running and things like that.
Spencer Dusebout
So that’s, yeah, and I threw a lot at you. So happy to double click on any of that.
Brett
A lot of founders that I bring on when I talk with them, they talk about going out and creating a new category. It seems like strategically though, you’ve decided to really just own mortgage CRM and double down on that space. Is that correct or is there a long term vision to create something additional on top of CRM?
Spencer Dusebout
Yeah, we’re very focused on what we’re doing right now in the audience that we’re serving. But really that core problem we’re solving is that of the distributed sales team and really serving that enterprise customer. So if you have, you know, obviously we can use the example of a bank, but again, as I kind of explain that the relationship that they have with like their loan officers and this is the same with an insurance agency and those kind of write the policies and real estate brokerages and the realtors. But again, really like the professionals at those particular companies can go elsewhere. They have a lot of flexibility because they’re really generating their own business.
Spencer Dusebout
And so as an enterprise, the question is how can they have a technology stack that is sticky and providing value bit both for recruiting additional talent, which all these industries do ad nauseam, and then also to retain them. And so one of the things that we’ve focused on is sort of the customization aspect. So people are in our platform at the enterprise level and customizing well, it becomes more challenging for them to maybe want to leave and go somewhere else. And so for us, that’s really the core problem we’re trying to solve. And we’re just, and right now we’re obviously more vertically specific because we’re definitely an early stage startup, but over time could definitely see us expanding and solving that problem in adjacent verticals as well.
Brett
At a high level, what does the go to market strategy look like?
Spencer Dusebout
Yeah, so this is evolved over time as these things tend to do. So initially went to market really going after those, like I said, top producers. And so, you know, think about a top producer. There’s somebody, they do 5000 million dollars and loan volume a year. I mean they make millions of dollars. They’re, they’re sophisticated and they have a team and you know, they’re competitive. They want to build their business, leverage technology to grow their business and get more time back in their day. And so it’s kind of an easy target to go after initially. In many cases, this particular Persona was using five or six different software systems and trying to connect them all via Zapier to like basically do what our system does. And so we found a lot of momentum going after those particular people.
Spencer Dusebout
And I think, you know, in this industry, you can definitely get your name out there pretty quickly. People talk, it’s large industry, but people do talk, especially at that level. So we had some success with trade shows doing things like podcast webinars in our particular vertical yield referrals was a huge source for our business. People would get on it and they would tell everybody within their coaching group things like that. And so initially we didn’t have a super concerted, I would say go to market or outbound strategy. We were just with referrals and the product that we had built, it was really pretty self serving from there. And I think phase two was really as we landed, these top producers expanding within the logos that were at.
Spencer Dusebout
So lets say you had a bank that had 300 potential users for us and we had ten on there, but that ten was, you know, those were some of the big hitters, that particular bank. And so really leveraging that to grow from ten to 20 to 100 to maybe try and go all the way to the top and get the entire enterprise contract. So could use the term land and expand. But that was a very considered intentional effort on our end. Like, okay, we’ve got some penetration, these logos, let’s grow that. That was phase two. We still do that, but we have shifted more and more up market as sort of phase three. And that’s really just identifying our sweet spot, which we have some criteria for.
Spencer Dusebout
And I’m happy to get into if you’d like, or that’s helpful, but it’s more of a quality account based marketing targeted approach. So going after some of the Personas that I mentioned that sending very relevant content, ad copy, we have a newer SDR motion with sort of mixed results so far. Since it’s news, a little early to tell, but we have emotion on account based marketing side that’s heavy and has generated quite a bit of pipeline. So that’s the high level. But again, like if there’s anything specific there, one dive into or I’m happy to.
Brett
Yeah, let’s go deeper into the Personas or really the process of identifying, determining what Personas those would be and then deciding those were the Personas to doubled down on. Can you take us back and talk through that journey?
Spencer Dusebout
Yeah. So at the enterprise there’s kind of two ends to this. There is that we still do target those top producers and this is relatively straightforward data to get. Like we have the data of every loan officer and how many loans they do and all that. So we’re able to see who the top producers are at particular logos. I think for us we’ve found our sweet spot is roughly call it banks, independent mortgage bank brokerages that do 500 million to 2 billion in volume a year. Because the sales cycle is quick. Typically have not invested in a salesforce build or anything like that. And kindly they’re looking for something like we provide. And so there’s about 600 logos there that also align with our tech stacks. So we’ll go about it.
Spencer Dusebout
Like I said, we’ll find the top producers and kind of go after them. So that’s growing a database and sending curated content to them about how they can leverage technology, AI, things like that. So to grow their business and case studies, all that fun stuff. And so that’s one end and that would be more of that land and expanded. But then on the enterprise side the percentage that we go after would be like a marketing director. So obviously curating content sort of more on the marketing side of things and then there would be like a head of production which is really just like ahead of sales. And for them like the data piece is really important. So we would kind of emphasize like our reporting suite, know your numbers, here’s how you can help your people do more loans, things like that.
Spencer Dusebout
And then we also do have, compliance is big in our world too. There’s sort of ever changing regulations. And so for us like curating content on the sort of compliance technical side as well, to like a chief information officer, you know, chief technical officer at those logos too can be quite effective. And so those are the Personas we’re going after. You know, it takes some work to kind of curate really good content. The way that we think about it is way to create content that it becomes like their job to read. Like if you’re a CIO at a bank, we should be providing you with great content that it’s like, this is my job, I gotta read this. Just like maybe a stockbroker would need to read the yahoo. Finance or the Wall Street Journal, whatever it is.
Spencer Dusebout
And so that’s how we approach that. And then as people engage we tend to kind of score the logos and be able to be a little bit more aggressive with outbound after a number of touch points. And once those percentage reach a certain level of engagement, did you know those.
Brett
Were the Personas you were going to target on day one or what was the process to identify those Personas? And were there any Personas that you thought this was going to be a hit and then it turned out it wasn’t going to be a core focus.
Spencer Dusebout
Yeah. So its been a moving target and it also comes down to how do you get the sale? Right? And I think that, and how do you get in the door? And so when you look at it like the top producer can definitely throw their weight around, but they cant force the enterprise to sign something. The head of marketing usually has a lot on their plate and they are very reluctant to any form of change management, changing software or anything like that, at least in our vertical. But they’re the easiest way into corporate because they’re always identifying and looking at new tools. It’s a big part of their job. And so for us initially, we’ve done a lot on the product to sort of make marketing our friend.
Spencer Dusebout
But initially, like we would try to go around the head of marketing in a sense where we would try to get more strengths or maybe lead conversion and get integrity, like all that stuff. And so we would try to get the kind of compliance technology production very much on our side and then also get like maybe that top producer saying how great it is. And then we would almost try to use that as kind of like a tsunami where the marketing director couldn’t torpedo a deal or slow it down or throw a wrench in it sort of initially. And then I think there was some success to that. But also, you know, it just made us realize that from a go to market side, like, we have to be able to find a way and to make the marketing director our friend.
Spencer Dusebout
And if we can do that, they’re also kind of the easiest way in. So it’s been iterative for sure. The dynamics are always very interesting in enterprise sales in general, but its always fascinating to see who can squash deals and who sort of the main voices are. It can definitely change from logo to logo, but typically its fairly consistent. And so we’ve learned who could be our advocates and we’ve learned that we need to get the buy in from marketing. Getting the buy in from compliance early is key because there is that chance that even if you build a lot of momentum and you go to them last, they can in some cases kind of kill the deals. And so those are things you just have to learn the hard way and iterate from there.
Brett
Today, what do you think has been the most important go to market decision you’ve made?
Spencer Dusebout
So we’re more vertically focused, which means that if you provide a good experience and a good product, people talk and there’s a lot of organic growth opportunities. And so look, I think that obviously enterprise SaaS is the creme de la creme, or whatever you want to call it. But it’s a tough market to figure out. And it’s enterprise grade software is a very different type of software than maybe a team based software and so I do think for us, starting with serving those top producers kind of at that team level, moving up market was the right choice, even though. Yeah, I think so. I think in our case that was the right choice.
Spencer Dusebout
And really focusing on just providing a fantastic experience, really solving their problems, listening to them and then leveraging just a massive amount of referrals has led to super efficient go to market engine. And so in a sense, like it really helped us because a lot of people look at those top producers that make millions of dollars a year and say, I want to be that person and they’re saying, you should use Aidium. So that led to a lot of organic growth early on. So I think that worked for us. I think maybe, yeah, even though we probably could have gotten to the enterprise level of software a little bit quicker, we’d focused on that initially.
Spencer Dusebout
I think we’ve taken a lot of money and I think we certainly wouldn’t be as far along as we are today from revenue growth and traction standpoint if we had gone that way from the get going.
Brett
What about the impact of the acquisition that you’ve made? I understand, I believe it was in early 2020 that you acquired whiteboard technology. Talk to us about that acquisition.
Spencer Dusebout
Yeah, I was in 22, I think look like the real estate market was.
Brett
Especially in mortgage too, with all the.
Spencer Dusebout
Refinances, was super hot in 2021 and there were a lot of platforms, but 22, 23 still, it’s definitely been an extremely historically tough market. I talk to people all the time that say I lived through 2008 and this has been harder in many ways, which I think is interesting, but just to kind of give you some insight into that. So there’s a lot of companies that didn’t have particularly sticky products that people were buying when they were flush and were getting rid of. And so there was definitely some opportunities for acquisition. I think what we really liked about whiteboard and that acquisition is their customer base.
Spencer Dusebout
They did have a number of really, I’d say they had some top producers on their platform that had influence and particular logos that were going after, but also they had some really great capabilities around automations and workflows that were able to leverage and incorporate that sort of extended that offering that we had and got it for a reasonable price point as well. So, yeah, it made sense from those different perspectives.
Brett
What were the learnings from that acquisition? Anything come to mind?
Spencer Dusebout
Yes. Acquisitions are extremely challenging and all consuming, and you have to really be able to justify it in order to do it. Like, I think I talked to a number of friends or whatever others in my network that are early stage founders. You know, just use an example. Let’s say someone’s at a million ARR, the opportunity to acquire another company that’s at a million ARR, it’s like, I can double in size. And it’s like, yeah, you can double in size, but it’s, I mean, you’re basically putting a lot of your current initiatives on hold for a long time because then you got to integrate the product. You got to migrate people. If the company you’re buying has good retention, that’s great, except that they’re going to hate migrating because they like their product, the product that they’re on.
Spencer Dusebout
If the company doesn’t have great retention, then what’s going to happen to that millionaire? Are you just acquired? And so the pros cons are, I think, early stage, getting your product right, finding that good market fit, finding a motion that can work where you can scale is way more important, unless there’s really something strategic on the technical side. But my sense of having kind of been up and close to that is when you have a great platform and you can acquire the businesses and kind of cross sell upsell your existing customer base, a lot of times those acquisitions can make quite a bit of sense. And even though it’s really tempting, you got to make sure its really worth it for the sake of revenue. I would say early on its probably not worth it.
Spencer Dusebout
Theres got to be another reason to want to do it.
Brett
Trey, what about fundraising lessons? So as I mentioned there in the intro, you recently raised, I believe, its $19 million series. What have you learned about fundraising throughout this journey?
Spencer Dusebout
Robert yeah, fundraising is, I think, a couple of things. One, you’re going to have to talk to a lot, a lot of people and I think a lot of newer founders and those of us that have been kind of in this game since like the, like I graduated college in 2015, there’s a lot of years where fundraising was fairly straightforward and it could be pretty automatic at times. And so I think you see that and you assume it would be that way for you. And I don’t think that is the case anymore unless you’re doing something a high related at that the moment. And so be prepared to talk to 100, 200 different companies and give them your pitch and learn from what’s resonating, what’s working and kind of double down on that.
Spencer Dusebout
And so I think there’s that component of just, you got to really grind it out until you start to see who’s resonating, who’s not. I think as a part of that, like every VC out there wants to be found. They’re friendly. So they’re all going to say they love your pitch. They’re all going to say that they’re interested and we’ll get back to you. But I think you really asking those hard questions of like, well, have you funded a company that’s doing something similar to mine? Or where are we on stage? Or how many investments are you looking to make this year? Oh, you’re looking to make four and you already made four. Okay, well, like those types of things, you have to get to those nos really quickly. And VC’s aren’t kind of volunteer that information.
Spencer Dusebout
They’re just going to all of a sudden, like everything was great and then you just kind of, you don’t really hear from them again. And so get to the nose. And then I think third is we’ve been fortunate. Like, I really love the partners that we work with. Alignment is key. So again, it can be tempting to just grab whatever money people throw at you, but really think through who you’re raising money from and what that means. So I held out for a while until we got into gross equity territory, meaning that they underwrote us to basically a three x return so we don’t have to become a unicorn to sell and exit. Right. And of course everyone wants to become a unicorn.
Spencer Dusebout
I’d love to be one, but I made a very conscious choice there, which is like, I don’t want to get in a fund where I have to. It’s unicorn bust, basically. I want us to be aligned that if we sell for $200 million, everyone’s happy. And so again, really just narrowing down who those potential partners are, being really honest about that with them and yourself. And again, just combining those three threads, it takes time. So raising money, it’s a relationship game. And VC’s love to see progress. They love to see you say, hey, we’re going to hit this number this year or over these next three months. And they might be reluctant or not super interested or on the fence today, but you see, you hit that, they will write checks because you’ve sort of demonstrated that progress.
Spencer Dusebout
And so building those relationships with people you identify could be a good fit. And giving yourself the time to do all that is super critical. So I would say at least six months. But really, if you can carve out a year to do this and start to build those relationships and show progress, you’re in a great spot. But it doesn’t, it might for some, but for me it wasn’t just like we’ve got these metrics and you throw it around, you get term sheets. Like we had really good metrics and really good traction and it still took us a long time to kind of get some traction with investors and get.
Brett
Our deal done outside of fundraising. If you were speaking with some founders right now, they’re trying to build mortgage technology. Whats the number one piece of advice that you’d have to give them?
Spencer Dusebout
Understand what your superpower is. Everyone has different superpowers. For me, im passionate about the product and building a product that having great product velocity and building something that is truly solving our customers problems. So for me to delegate that away would just be suicidal. And there’s, and you know, and I’ve learned from experience other founders are fantastic at sales. Like don’t hire ahead of sales. You be that as sales, no one’s going to do it better than you. And so understand that’s your power. Really lean into it. Do not delegate that. Maybe ever. But certainly, I mean, you should be ten plus an ARR with a repeatable go to market motion before you do that. I mean, that’s sort of what I’ve seen and what I’ve heard from a lot of mentors and other founders that have gotten there.
Spencer Dusebout
And so I think that’s number one, I think number two is culture really matters. Like the founders listen to your podcast, know, like you are rolling upstream. It is really hard. It is extremely challenging and need to build a culture of like minded people that buy into the way that you do things. And the reality is there’s a lot of different cultures and a lot of different ways that you can build a company just because some people use okrs. I mean, that might work for you, but it might not work for you. And I think it’s really easy. And I certainly fell into this trap early on. When you start to get traction, growing quickly and things are chaotic and crazy, you start to say, well, we got to really create a lot of structure around this, start to do things differently.
Spencer Dusebout
And there’s an element of that, but it has to kind of stay true to like who you are and what you want. Your company ethos to look like. And you can save a lot of time and energy, like if you know, by avoiding hiring people that might be fantastic at their jobs or just culturally don’t align with what you’re trying to build or have a different view on how companies should be built organized. And so, yeah, culture really does matter. And it’s not your job to confine or to a different culture, especially at this early stage. It’s the people that you bring on need to be aligned to the culture that you want or kind of gravitate to how you’re doing things. And so those are two lessons I would say I learned the hard way early on.
Brett
And final question for you here before we wrap up, let’s zoom out into the future. So three to five years from today, what’s the company look like?
Spencer Dusebout
Yeah, I think theres different paths. So I think for us, again, we tried to align ourselves with an investor that they underwrote us to that three x. And so we have that as an option, which is great. Lets say we continue to have capital, efficient growth and mortgage. We cant really break into insurance or title or these other verticals. We have a great path to a successful exit or just to build a company thats profitable and doing really well. So I think thats one end and on the other end is the product really resonates and the good market motion, we’re crushing it. And then you start maybe thinking like a series b and really trying to get to that next milestone. And the way I look at it is I’m looking at the data to see how we’re doing. And obviously bigger is better.
Spencer Dusebout
As people list your products should know to build a product that people are willing to pay for. And it’s hard to do. And so when you crack that code a little bit, it’s fun and you want to push it as hard as you can. You don’t get those opportunities very often. But for me, I’m very data driven. So this year we launched our data warehouse data visualization product. And that’s beyond some traction, things like that. But we’re going to continue to rate on the product side and we’re going to continue to make sure our customers are happy. And the go to market is they’re going to scale accordingly and we’ll continue to get more traction verticals or, you know, maybe it won’t be quite as explosive growth as we were hoping for.
Spencer Dusebout
And we have to kind of land the plane for a small exit. So I like the optionality I think it’s something that I definitely I don’t feel like I’m up late at night thinking that we got to get to a billion dollars or bus, which is really nice. But for me, it’s also taking it one day at a time and understanding that if our customers are happy and the product sticky and they’re staying and they’re buying more of what we’re bringing to market, then good things are bound to happen. So that’s where most of my focus lives.
Brett
Love the approach and love the optionality. There we are, up on time, so we’ll have to wrap here before we do, if there’s any founders that are listening in that want to follow along with your journey, where should they go?
Spencer Dusebout
Yeah, just find me on LinkedIn and connect with me and send me a message, and you’ll mention that you’re listening to the pod and happy to chat. I do post on LinkedIn from time to time as well, so you kind of see how Aidium continues to progress and the lessons that I continue to learn along the way.
Brett
Amazing. Spencer, thanks so much. Really appreciate it.
Spencer Dusebout
Yeah, thanks, Xiaomi. Brett was great.
Brett
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